I. THE
RESTORATION OF
THE EASY CHAIR
BY WAY OF
INTRODUCTION
II. A YEAR OF
SPRING AND A
LIFE OF YOUTH
III. SCLEROSIS
OF THE TASTES
IV. THE
PRACTICES AND
PRECEPTS OF
VAUDEVILLE
V. INTIMATIONS
OF ITALIAN OPERA
VI. THE
SUPERIORITY OF
OUR INFERIORS
VII.
UNIMPORTANCE OF
WOMEN IN
REPUBLICS
VIII. HAVING
JUST GOT HOME
IX. NEW YORK TO
THE HOME-COMER'S
EYE
X. CHEAPNESS OF
THE COSTLIEST
CITY ON EARTH
XI. WAYS AND
MEANS OF LIVING
IN NEW YORK
XII. THE QUALITY
OF BOSTON AND
THE QUANTITY OF
NEW YORK
XIII. THE WHIRL
OF LIFE IN OUR
FIRST CIRCLES
XIV. THE
MAGAZINE MUSE
XV. COMPARATIVE
LUXURIES OF
TRAVEL
XVI. QUALITIES
WITHOUT DEFECTS
XVII. A WASTED
OPPORTUNITY
XVIII. A NIECE'S
LITERARY ADVICE
TO HER UNCLE
XIX. A SEARCH
FOR CELEBRITY
XX. PRACTICAL
IMMORTALITY ON
EARTH
XXI. AROUND A
RAINY-DAY FIRE
XXII. THE
ADVANTAGES OF
QUOTATIONAL
CRITICISM
XXIII. READING
FOR A
GRANDFATHER
XXIV. SOME
MOMENTS WITH THE
MUSE
XXV. A NORMAL
HERO AND HEROINE
OUT OF WORK
OTHER ESSAYS.
I. AUTUMN IN THE
COUNTRY AND CITY
II. PERSONAL AND
EPISTOLARY
ADDRESSES
III. DRESSING
FOR HOTEL DINNER
IV. THE COUNSEL
OF LITERARY AGE
TO LITERARY
YOUTH
V. THE
UNSATISFACTORINESS
OF UNFRIENDLY
CRITICISM
VI. THE
FICKLENESS OF
AGE
VII. THE RENEWAL
OF INSPIRATION
VIII. THE SUMMER
SOJOURN OF
FLORINDO AND
LINDORA
IX. TO HAVE THE
HONOR OF MEETING
X. A DAY AT
BRONX PARK

It is not generally known that after forty-two years of constant use
the aged and honored movable which now again finds itself put back in
its old place in the rear of Harper's Magazine was stored in the
warehouse of a certain safety-deposit company, in the winter of 1892.
The event which had then vacated the chair is still so near as to be
full of a pathos tenderly personal to all readers of that magazine, and
may not be lightly mentioned in any travesty of the facts by one who
was thought of for the empty place. He, before putting on the mask and
mimic editorial robesfor it was never the real editor who sat in the
Easy Chair, except for that brief hour when he took it to pay his
deep-thought and deep-felt tribute to its last occupantstood with
bowed face and uncovered head in that bravest and gentlest presence
which, while it abode with us here, men knew as George William Curtis.

It was, of course, in one of the best of the fireproof warehouses
that the real editor had the Easy Chair stored, and when the unreal
editor went to take it out of storage he found it without trouble in
one of those vast rooms where the more valuable furniture and
bric-a-brac are guarded in a special tutelage. If instinct had not
taught him, he would have known it by its homely fashion, which the
first unreal editor had suggested when he described it as an old
red-backed Easy Chair that has long been an ornament of our dingy
office. That unreality was Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, the graceful and
gracious Ik Marvel, dear to the old hearts that are still young for his
Dream Life and his Reveries of a Bachelor, and never unreal
in anything but his pretence of being the real editor of the magazine.
In this disguise he feigned that he had a way of throwing himself
back in the Easy Chair, and indulging in an easy and careless overlook
of the gossiping papers of the day, and in such chit-chat with chance
visitors as kept him informed of the drift of the town talk, while it
relieved greatly the monotony of his office hours. Not bent on
choosing mere gossip, he promised to be on the watch for such topics
or incidents as seemed really important and suggestive, and to set
them down with all that gloss, and that happy lack of sequence, which
make every-day talk so much better than every-day writing.

While the actual unreality stood thinking how perfectly the theory
and practice of the Easy Chair for hard upon fifty years had been
forecast in these words, and while the warehouse agent stood waiting
his pleasure, the Easy Chair fetched a long, deep sigh. Sigh one must
call the sound, but it was rather like that soft complaint of the woody
fibres in a table which disembodied spirits are about to visit, and
which continues to exhale from it till their peculiar vocabulary utters
itself in a staccato of muffled taps. No one who has heard that sound
can mistake it for another, and the unreal editor knew at once that he
confronted in the Easy Chair an animate presence.

How long have I been here? it asked, like one wakened from a deep
sleep.

About eight years, said the unreal editor.

Ah, I remember, the Easy Chair murmured, and, as the unreal editor
bent forward to pluck away certain sprays of foliage that clung to its
old red back, it demanded, What is that?

Some bits of holly and mistletoe.

Yes, the Easy Chair softly murmured again. The last essay he
wrote in me was about Christmas. I have not forgotten one word of it
all: how it began, how it went on, and how it ended! 'In the very
promise of the year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question
that we have to ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of
Christmas which already shines afar off, is this: whether while we
praise Christmas as a day of general joy we take care to keep it so....
Thackeray describes a little dinner at the Timminses'. A modest couple
make themselves miserable and spend all their little earnings in order
to give a dinner to people for whom they do not care, and who do not
care for them.... Christmas is made miserable to the Timminses because
they feel that they must spend lavishly and buy gifts like their richer
neighbors.... You cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of
friendly sympathy costs little.... Should not the extravagance of
Christmas cause every honest man and woman practically to protest by
refusing to yield to the extravagance?' There! the Easy Chair broke
off from quoting, that was Curtis! The kind and reasonable mood, the
righteous conscience incarnate in the studied art, the charming
literary allusion for the sake of the unliterary lesson, the genial
philosophy

'not too good
For human nature's daily food'

the wisdom alike of the closet and the public square, the large
patience and the undying hopefulness! Do you think, the Easy Chair
said, with a searching severity one would not have expected of it,
that you are fit to take his place?

In evasion of this hard question the unreal editor temporized with
the effect of not having heard it. I believe that he and Mr. Mitchell
were the only writers of your papers till Mr. Alden wrote the last?

The Easy Chair responded, dryly, You forget Aldrich.

If I do, I am the only pebble on the shore of time that does or
will, retorted the unreal editor. But he wrote you for only two
months. I well remember what a pleasure he had in it. And he knew how
to make his readers share his pleasure! Still, it was Mr. Mitchell who
invented you, and it was Curtis who characterized you beyond all the
rest.

For a while, said the Easy Chair, with autobiographical relish,
they wrote me together, but it was not long before Mr. Mitchell left
off, and Curtis kept on alone, and, as you say, he incomparably
characterized me. He had his millennial hopes as well as you. In his
youth he trusted in a time

'When the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,'

and he never lost that faith. As he wrote in one of my best papers,
the famous paper on Brook Farm, 'Bound fast by the brazen age, we can
see that the way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which
will substitute co-operation for competition.' He expected the world to
be made over in the image of heaven some time, but meanwhile he was
glad to help make it even a little better and pleasanter than he found
it. He was ready to tighten a loose screw here and there, to pour a
drop of oil on the rusty machinery, to mend a broken wheel. He was not
above putting a patch on a rift where a whiff of infernal air came up
from the Bottomless Pit

And I also believe in alleviations, the unreal editor interrupted.
I love justice, but charity is far better than nothing; and it would
be abominable not to do all we can because we cannot at once do
everything. Let us have the expedients, the ameliorations, even the
compromises, en attendant the millennium. Let us accept the
provisional, the makeshift. He who came on Christmas Day, and whose
mission, as every Christmas Day comes to remind us, was the
brotherhood, the freedom, the equality of men, did not He warn us
against hastily putting new wine into old bottles? To get the new
bottles ready is slow work: that kind of bottle must grow; it cannot be
made; and in the mean time let us keep our latest vintages in the vat
till we have some vessel proof against their fermentation. I know that
the hope of any such vessel is usually mocked as mere optimism, but I
think optimism is as wise and true as pessimism, or is at least as well
founded; and since the one can no more establish itself as final truth
than the other, it is better to have optimism. That was always the
philosophy of the Easy Chair, and I do not know why that should be
changed. The conditions are not changed.

There was a silence which neither the Easy Chair nor the unreal
editor broke for a while. Then the Chair suggested, I suppose that
there is not much change in Christmas, at any rate?

No, said the unreal editor; it goes on pretty much as it used.
The Timminses, who give tiresome little dinners which they cannot
afford to dull people who don't want them, are still alive and
miserably bent on heaping reluctant beneficiaries with undesired
favors, and spoiling the simple 'pleasure of the time' with the
activities of their fatuous vanity. Or perhaps you think I ought to
bring a hopeful mind even to the Timminses?

I don't see why not, said the Easy Chair. They are not the
architects of their own personalities.

Ah, take care, take care! cried the unreal editor. You will be
saying next that we are the creatures of our environment; that the
Timminses would be wiser and better if the conditions were not idiotic
and pernicious; and you know what that comes to!

No, I am in no danger of that, the Easy Chair retorted. The
Timminses are no such victims of the conditions. They are of that vast
moderately moneyed class who can perfectly well behave with sense if
they will. Nobody above them or below them asks them to be foolish and
wasteful.

And just now you were making excuses for them!

I said they were not the architects of their own personalities;
but, nevertheless, they are masters of themselves. They are really free
to leave off giving little dinners any day they think so. It should be
the moralist's business to teach them to think so.

And that was what Curtis gladly made his business, the unreal
editor somewhat sadly confessed, with an unspoken regret for his own
difference. More than once it had seemed to him in considering that
rare nature that he differed from most reformers chiefly in loving the
right rather than in hating the wrong; in fact, in not hating at all,
but in pitying and accounting for the wrong as an ancient use corrupted
into an abuse. Involuntarily the words of the real editor in that
beautiful tribute to the high soul they were praising came to the
unreal editor's lips, and he quoted aloud to the Easy Chair: 'His love
of goodness was a passion. He would fain have seen all that was fair
and good, and he strove to find it so; and, finding it otherwise, he
strove to make it so.... With no heart for satire, the discord that
fell upon his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment
upon social shams and falsehoods.... But he was a lover of peace, and,
... as he was the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the
ideal reformer, without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his
ideal, it never parted company with good sense. He never wanted better
bread than could be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and
sound,' and I may add, the unreal editor broke off, that he did not
hurry the unripe grain to the hopper. He would not have sent all the
horses at once to the abattoir because they made the city noisy and
noisome, but would first have waited till there were automobiles enough
to supply their place.

The Easy Chair caught at the word. Automobiles? it echoed.

Ah, I forgot how long you have been stored, said the unreal
editor, and he explained as well as he could the new mode of motion,
and how already, with its soft rubber galoshes, the automobile had
everywhere stolen a march upon the iron heels of the horses in the city
avenues.

He fancied the Easy Chair did not understand, quite, from the
intelligent air with which it eagerly quitted the subject.

Well, it said at last, this isn't such a bad time to live in,
after all, it appears. But for a supreme test of your optimism, now,
what good can you find to say of Christmas? What sermon could you
preach on that hackneyed theme which would please the fancy and gladden
the heart of the readers of a Christmas number, where you should make
your first appearance in the Easy Chair?

To himself the unreal editor had to own that this was a poser. In
his heart he was sick of Christmas: not of the dear and high event, the
greatest in the memory of the world, which it records and embodies, but
the stale and wearisome Christmas of the Christmas presents, purchased
in rage and bestowed in despair; the Christmas of Christmas fiction;
the Christmas of heavy Christmas dinners and indigestions; the
Christmas of all superfluity and surfeit and sentimentality; the
Christmas of the Timminses and the Tiny Tims. But while he thought of
these, by operation of the divine law which renders all things sensible
by their opposites, he thought of the other kinds of Christmas which
can never weary or disgust: the Christmas of the little children and
the simple-hearted and the poor; and suddenly he addressed himself to
the Easy Chair with unexpected and surprising courage.

Why should that be so very difficult? he demanded. If you look at
it rightly, Christmas is always full of inspiration; and songs as well
as sermons will flow from it till time shall be no more. The trouble
with us is that we think it is for the pleasure of opulent and elderly
people, for whom there can be no pleasures, but only habits. They are
used to having everything, and as joy dwells in novelty it has ceased
to be for them in Christmas gifts and giving and all manner of
Christmas conventions. But for the young to whom these things are new,
and for the poor to whom they are rare, Christmas and Christmasing are
sources of perennial happiness. All that you have to do is to guard
yourself from growing rich and from growing old, and then the delight
of Christmas is yours forever. It is not difficult; it is very simple;
for even if years and riches come upon you in a literal way, you can by
a little trying keep yourself young and poor in spirit. Then you can
always rejoice with the innocent and riot with the destitute.

I once knew a father, the unreal editor continued, a most doting
and devoted father, who, when he bent over the beds of his children to
bid them good-night, and found them 'high sorrowful and cloyed,' as the
little ones are apt to be after a hard day's pleasure, used to bid them
'Think about Christmas.' If he offered this counsel on the night, say,
of the 26th of December, and they had to look forward to a whole year
before their hopes of consolation could possibly find fruition, they
had (as they afterward confessed to him) a sense of fatuity if not of
mocking in it. Even on the Fourth of July, after the last cracker had
been fired and the last roman candle spent, they owned that they had
never been able to think about Christmas to an extent that greatly
assuaged their vague regrets. It was not till the following
Thanksgiving that they succeeded in thinking about Christmas with
anything like the entire cheerfulness expected of them.

I don't see any application in this homily, said the Easy Chair,
or only an application disastrous to your imaginable postulate that
Christmas is a beneficent and consolatory factor in our lives.

That is because you have not allowed me to conclude, the unreal
editor protested, when the Easy Chair cut in with,

There is nothing I would so willingly allow you to do, and
laughed and shook as if it had been Rabelais's easy chair.

The unreal editor thought it best to ignore the untimely attempt at
wit. The difficulty in this case with both the father and the children
was largely temperamental; but it was chiefly because of a defect in
their way of thinking about Christmas. It was a very ancient error, by
no means peculiar to this amiable family, and it consisted in thinking
about Christmas with reference to one's self instead of others.

Isn't that rather banal? the Easy Chair asked.

Not at all banal, said the unreal editor, resisting an impulse to
do the Easy Chair some sort of violence. At the same time he made his
reflection that if preachers were criticised in that way to their faces
there would shortly be very few saints left in the pulpit. He gave
himself a few moments to recover his temper, and then he went on: If
Christmas means anything at all, it means anything but one's own
pleasure. Up to the first Christmas Day the whole world had supposed
that it could be happy selfishly, and its children still suppose so.
But there is really no such thing as selfish, as personal happiness.

Tolstoy, the Easy Chair noted.

Yes, Tolstoy, the unreal editor retorted. He more than any other
has brought us back to the knowledge of this truth which came into the
world with Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, has
tried to think and to live Christianity. When once you have got this
vital truth into your mind, the whole universe is luminously filled
with the possibilities of impersonal, unselfish happiness. The joy of
living is suddenly expanded to the dimensions of humanity, and you can
go on taking your pleasure as long as there is one unfriended soul and
body in the world.

It is well to realize this at all times, but it is peculiarly fit
to do so at Christmas-time, for it is in this truth that the worship of
Christ begins. Now, too, is the best time to give the Divine Word form
in deed, to translate love into charity. I do not mean only the
material charity that expresses itself in turkeys and plum-puddings for
the poor, but also that spiritual charity which takes thought how so to
amend the sorrowful conditions of civilization that poverty, which is
the antithesis of fraternity, shall abound less and less.

'Now is the time, now is the time,
Now is the hour of golden prime'

for asking one's self, not how much one has given in goods or moneys
during the past year, but how much one has given in thought and will to
remove forever the wrong and shame of hopeless need; and to consider
what one may do in the coming year to help put the poor lastingly
beyond the need of help.

To despair of somehow, sometime doing this is to sin against the
light of Christmas Day, to confess its ideal a delusion, its practice a
failure. If on no other day of all the three hundred and sixty-five, we
must on this day renew our faith in justice, which is the highest
mercy.

The Easy Chair no longer interrupted, and the unreal editor, having
made his point, went on after the manner of preachers, when they are
also editors, to make it over again, and to repeat himself pitilessly,
unsparingly. He did not observe that the Easy Chair had shrunk forward
until all its leathern seat was wrinkled and its carven top was bent
over its old red back. When he stopped at last, the warehouse agent
asked in whisper,

What do you want done with it, sir?

Oh, said the unreal editor, send it back to Franklin Square; and
then, with a sudden realization of the fact, he softly added, Don't
wake it.

There in Franklin Square, still dreaming, it was set up in the rear
of the magazine, where it has become not only the place, but the stuff
of dreams such as men are made of. From month to month, ever since, its
reveries, its illusions, which some may call deliverances, have gone on
with more and more a disposition to dramatize themselves. It has seemed
to the occupant of the Easy Chair, at times, as if he had suffered with
it some sort of land-change from a sole entity to a multiple
personality in which his several selves conversed with one another, and
came and went unbidden. At first, after a moment of question whether
his imagination was not frequented by the phantoms of delight which in
the flesh had formerly filled his place, whether the spirits which
haunted him in it were not those of Mitchell, of Curtis, of Aldrich, he
became satisfied from their multitude and nature that they were the
subdivisions of his own ego, and as such he has more and more frankly
treated them.

On one of those fine days which the April of the other year meanly
grudged us, a poet, flown with the acceptance of a quarter-page lyric
by the real editor in the Study next door, came into the place where
the Easy Chair sat rapt in the music of the elevated trains and the
vision of the Brooklyn Bridge towers. Era la stagione nella quale la
rivestita terra, piu che tutto l' altro anno, si mostra bella, he
said, without other salutation, throwing his soft gray hat on a heap of
magazines and newspapers in the corner, and finding what perch he could
for himself on the window-sill.

What is that? he of the Easy Chair gruffly demanded; he knew
perfectly well, but he liked marring the bloom on a fellow-creature's
joy by a show of savage ignorance.

It's the divine beginning of Boccaccio's 'Fiammetta,' it is the
very soul of spring; and it is so inalienably of Boccaccio's own time
and tongue and sun and air that there is no turning it into the
language of another period or climate. What would you find to thrill
you in, 'It was the season in which the reapparelled earth, more than
in all the other year, shows herself fair'? The rhythm is lost; the
flow, sweet as the first runnings of the maple where the woodpecker has
tapped it, stiffens into sugar, the liquid form is solidified into the
cake adulterated with glucose, and sold for a cent as the pure Vermont
product.

As he of the Easy Chair could not deny this, he laughed recklessly.
I understood what your passage from Boccaccio meant, and why you came
in here praising spring in its words. You are happy because you have
sold a poem, probably for more than it is worth. But why do you praise
spring? What do you fellows do it for? You know perfectly well that it
is the most capricious, the most treacherous, the most delusive,
deadly, slatternly, down-at-heels, milkmaid-handed season of the year,
without decision of character or fixed principles, and with only the
vaguest raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and
streaming eyes. If it did not come at the end of winter, when people
are glad of any change, nobody could endure it, and it would be cast
neck and crop out of the calendar. Fancy spring coming at the end of
summer! It would not be tolerated for a moment, with the contrast of
its crude, formless beauty and the ripe loveliness of August. Every
satisfied sense of happiness, secure and established, would be insulted
by its haphazard promises made only to be broken. 'Rather,' the
outraged mortal would say, 'the last tender hours of autumn, the first
deathful-thrilling snowfall, with all the thoughts of life wandering
flake-like through the dim airrather these than the recurrence of
those impulses and pauses, those kisses frozen on the lips, those
tender rays turning to the lash of sleet across the face of nature. No,
the only advantage spring can claim over her sister seasons is her
novelty, the only reason she can offer for being the spoiled child of
the poets is that nobody but the poets could keep on fancying that
there was any longer the least originality in her novelty.

The poet attempted to speak, in the little stop he of the Easy Chair
made for taking breath, but he was not suffered to do so.

Every atom of originality has been drained from the novelty of
spring 'in the process of the suns,' and science is rapidly depriving
her even of novelty. What was once supposed to be the spring grass has
been found to be nothing but the fall grass, with the green stealing
back into the withered blades. As for the spring lamb which used to
crop the spring grass, it is now out of the cold-storage where the
spring chicken and the new-laid eggs of yesteryear come from. It is
said that there are no birds in last year's nests, but probably a
careful examination would discover a plentiful hatch of nestlings which
have hibernated in the habitations popularly supposed to be deserted
the June before this. Early spring vegetables are in market throughout
the twelvemonth, and spring flowers abound at the florists' in December
and January. There is no reason why spring should not be absorbed into
winter and summer by some such partition as took place politically in
the case of Poland. Like that unhappy kingdom, she has abused her
independence and become a molestation and discomfort to the annual
meteorology. As a season she is distinctly a failure, being neither one
thing nor the other, neither hot nor cold, a very Laodicean. Her winds
were once supposed to be very siccative, and peculiarly useful in
drying the plaster in new houses; but now the contractors put in
radiators as soon as the walls are up, and the work is done much
better. As for the germinative force of her suns, in these days of
intensive farming, when electricity is applied to the work once done by
them, they can claim to have no virtue beyond the suns of July or
August, which most seeds find effective enough. If spring were absorbed
into summer, the heat of that season would be qualified, and its
gentler warmth would be extended to autumn, which would be prolonged
into the winter. The rigors of winter would be much abated, and the
partition of spring among the other seasons would perform the mystic
office of the Gulf Stream in ameliorating our climate, besides ridding
us of a time of most tedious and annoying suspense. And what should we
lose by it?

The poet seemed not to be answering the Easy Chair directly, but
only to be murmuring to himself, Youth.

Youth! Youth! the Easy Chair repeated in exasperation. And what
is youth?

The best thing in the world.

For whom is it the best thing?

This question seemed to give the poet pause. Well, he said,
finally, with a not very forcible smile, for itself.

Ah, there you are! he of the Easy Chair exclaimed; but he could
not help a forgiving laugh. In a way you are right. The world belongs
to youth, and so it ought to be the best thing for itself in it. Youth
is a very curious thing, and in that it is like spring, especially like
the spring we have just been having, to our cost. It is the only period
of life, as spring is the only season of the year, that has too much
time on its hands. Yet it does not seem to waste time, as age does, as
winter does; it keeps doing something all the while. The things it does
are apparently very futile and superfluous, some of them, but in the
end something has been accomplished. After a March of whimsical suns
and snows, an April of quite fantastical frosts and thaws, and a May,
at least partially, of cold mists and parching winds, the flowers,
which the florists have been forcing for the purpose, are blooming in
the park; the grass is green wherever it has not had the roots trodden
out of it, and a filmy foliage, like the soft foulard tissues which the
young girls are wearing, drips from the trees. You can say it is all
very painty, the verdure; too painty; but you cannot reject the picture
because of this little mannerism of the painter. To be sure, you miss
the sheeted snows and the dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the
hard, blue sky. Still, now it has come, you cannot deny that the spring
is pretty, or that the fashionable colors which it has introduced are
charming. It is said that these are so charming that a woman of the
worst taste cannot choose amiss among them. In spite of her taste, her
hat comes out a harmonic miracle; her gown, against all her endeavors,
flows in an exquisite symphony of the tender audacities of tint with
which nature mixes her palette; little notes of chiffon, of tulle, of
feather, blow all about her. This is rather a medley of metaphors, to
which several arts contribute, but you get my meaning? In making this
appeal, he of the Easy Chair saw in the fixed eye of the poet that
remoteness of regard which denotes that your listener has been hearing
very little of what you have been saying.

Yes, the poet replied with a long breath, you are right about
that dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the hard, blue sky; and I
wonder if we quite do justice to the beauty of winter, of age, we
poets, when we are so glad to have the spring come.

I don't know about winter, he of the Easy Chair said, but in an
opera which the English Lord Chamberlain provisionally suppressed, out
of tenderness for an alliance not eventually or potentially to the
advantage of these States, Mr. William Gilbert has done his duty to the
decline of life, where he sings,

'There is beauty in extreme old age;
There's a fascination frantic
In a ruin that's romantic'

Or, at least no one else has said so much for 'that time of life,'
which another librettist has stigmatized as

'Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.'

Yes, I know, the poet returned, clinging to the thread of thought
on which he had cast himself loose. But I believe a great deal more
could be said for age by the poets if they really tried. I am not
satisfied of Mr. Gilbert's earnestness in the passage you quote from
the 'Mikado,' and I prefer Shakespeare's 'bare, ruined choirs.' I don't
know but I prefer the hard, unflattering portrait which Hamlet
mockingly draws for Polonius, and there is something almost caressing
in the notion of 'the lean and slippered pantaloon.' The worst of it is
that we old fellows look so plain to one another; I dare say young
people don't find us so bad. I can remember from my own youth that I
thought old men, and especially old women, rather attractive. I am not
sure that we elders realize the charm of a perfectly bald head as it
presents itself to the eye of youth. Yet, an infant's head is often
quite bald.

Yes, and so is an egg, the Easy Chair retorted, but there is not
the same winning appeal in the baldness of the superannuated bird which
has evolved from iteagle or nightingale, parrot or

Many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home.

Tennyson has done his best in showing us venerable in his picture of

'the Ionian father of the rest:
A million wrinkles carved his silver skin,
A hundred winters snowed upon his breast.'

But who would not rather be Helen than Homer, her face launching a
thousand ships and burning the topless tower of Ilionfairer than the
evening air and simply but effectively attired in the beauty of a
thousand stars? What poet has ever said things like that of an old man,
even of Methuselah?

Yes, the poet sighed. I suppose you are partly right. Meteorology
certainly has the advantage of humanity in some things. We cannot make
much of age here, and hereafter we can only conceive of its being
turned into youth. Fancy an eternity of sensibility!

No, I would rather not! he of the Easy Chair returned, sharply.
Besides, it is you who are trying to make age out a tolerable, even a
desirable thing.

But I have given it up, the poet meekly replied. The great thing
would be some rearrangement of our mortal conditions so that once a
year we could wake from our dream of winter and find ourselves young.
Not merely younger, but youngthe genuine article. A tree can
do that, and does it every year, until after a hundred years, or three
hundred, or a thousand, it dies. Why should not a man, or, much more
importantly, a woman, do it? I think we are very much scanted in that
respect.

My dear fellow, if you begin fault-finding with creation, there
will be no end to it. It might be answered that, in this case, you can
walk about and a tree cannot; you can call upon me and a tree cannot.
And other things. Come! the trees have not got it all their own way.
Besides, imagine the discomforts of a human springtime, blowing hot and
blowing cold, freezing, thawing, raining, and drouthing, and never
being sure whether we are young or old, May or December. We should be
such nuisances to one another that we should ask the gods to take back
their gift, and you know very well they cannot.

Our rejuvenescence would be a matter of temperament, not
temperature, the poet said, searching the air hopefully for an idea.
I have noticed this spring that the isothermal line is as crooked as a
railroad on the map of a rival. I have been down in New Hampshire since
I saw you, and I found the spring temperamentally as far advanced there
as here in New York. Of course not as far advanced as in Union Square,
but quite as far as in Central Park. Between Boston and Portsmouth
there were bits of railroad bank that were as green as the sward beside
the Mall, and every now and then there was an enthusiastic maple in the
wet lowlands that hung the air as full of color as any maple that
reddened the flying landscape when I first got beyond the New York
suburbs on my way north. At Portsmouth the birds were singing the same
songs as in the Park. I could not make out the slightest difference.

With the same note of nervous apprehension in them?

I did not observe that. But they were spring songs, certainly.

Then, the Easy Chair said, I would rather my winter were turned
into summer, or early autumn, than spring, if there is going to be any
change of the mortal conditions. I like settled weather, the calm of
that time of life when the sins and follies have been committed, the
passions burned themselves out, and the ambitions frustrated so that
they do not bother, the aspirations defeated, the hopes brought low.
Then you have some comfort. This turmoil of vernal striving makes me
tired.

Yes, I see what you mean, the poet assented. But you cannot have
the seasons out of their order in the rearrangement of the mortal
conditions. You must have spring and you must have summer before you
can have autumn.

Are those the terms? Then I say, Winter at once! Winter is bad
enough, but I would not go through spring again for anyIn winter you
can get away from the cold, with a good, warm book, or a sunny picture,
or a cozy old song, or a new play; but in spring how will you escape
the rawness if you have left off your flannels and let out the furnace?
No, my dear friend, we could not stand going back to youth every year.
The trees can, because they have been used to it from the beginning of
time, but the men could not. Even the women

At this moment a beatific presence made itself sensible, and the
Easy Chair recognized the poet's Muse, who had come for him. The poet
put the question to her. Young? she said. Why, you and I are
always young, silly boy! Get your hat, and come over to Long Island
City with me, and see the pussy-willows along the railroad-banks. The
mosquitoes are beginning to sing in the ditches already.

The other day one of those convertible familiars of the Easy Chair,
who

Change and pass and come again,

looked in upon it, after some months' absence, with the effect of
having aged considerably in the interval. But this was only his latest
avatar; he was no older, as he was no younger, than before; to support
a fresh character, he had to put on an appropriate aspect, and having,
at former interviews, been a poet, a novelist, a philosopher, a
reformer, a moralist, he was now merely looking the part of a veteran
observer, of a psychologist grown gray in divining the character of
others from his own consciousness.

Have you ever noticed, he began, that the first things we get
stiff in, as we advance in life, are our tastes? We suppose that it is
our joints which feel the premonitions of age; and that because we no
longer wish to dance or play ball or sprint in college races we are in
the earliest stage of that sapless condition when the hinges of the
body grind dryly upon one another, and we lose a good inch of our
stature, through shrinkage, though the spine still holds us steadfastly
upright.

Well, isn't that so? the Easy Chair asked, tranquilly.

It may be so, or it may not be so, the veteran observer replied.
Ultimately, I dare say, it is so. But what I wish to enforce is the
fact that before you begin to feel the faintest sense of stiffening
joints you are allowing yourself to fall into that voluntary senescence
which I call getting stiff in the tastes. It is something that I think
we ought to guard ourselves against as a sort of mental sclerosis which
must end fatally long before we have reached the patriarchal age which
that unbelieving believer Metchnikoff says we can attain if we fight
off physical sclerosis. He can only negatively teach us how to do this,
but I maintain we can have each of us in our power the remedy against
stiffening tastes.

I don't see how, the Easy Chair said, more to provoke the sage to
explanation than to express dissent.

I will teach you how, he said, if you will allow me to make it a
personal matter, and use you in illustration.

Why not use yourself?

Because that would be egotistical, and the prime ingredient of my
specific against getting stiff in the tastes is that spiritual grace
which is the very antidote, the very antithesis of egotism. Up to a
certain point, a certain time, we are usefully employed in cultivating
our tastes, in refining them, and in defining them. We cannot be too
strenuous in defining them; and, as long as we are young, the
catholicity of youth will preserve us from a bigoted narrowness. In
aesthetic mattersand I imagine we both understand that we are dealing
with thesethe youngest youth has no tastes; it has merely appetites.
All is fish that comes to its net; if anything, it prefers the gaudier
of the finny tribes; it is only when it becomes sophisticated that its
appetites turn into tastes, and it begins to appreciate the flavor of
that diseased but pearl-bearing species of oyster which we call genius,
because we have no accurate name for it. With the appreciation of this
flavor comes the overpowering desire for it, the incessant and
limitless search for it. To the desire for it whole literatures owe
their continued existence, since, except for the universal
genius-hunger of youth, the classics of almost all languages would have
perished long ago. When indiscriminate and omnivorous youth has
explored those vast and mostly lifeless seas, it has found that the
diseased oyster which bears the pearls is the rarest object in nature.
But having once formed the taste for it, youth will have no other
flavor, and it is at this moment that its danger of hardening into
premature age begins. The conceit of having recognized genius takes the
form of a bigoted denial of its existence save in the instances
recognized. This conceit does not admit the possibility of error or
omission in the search, and it does not allow that the diseased oyster
can transmit its pearl-bearing qualities and its peculiar flavors; so
that the attitude of aging youth, in the stiffening of its tastes, is
one of rejection toward all new bivalves, or, not to be tediously
metaphorical, books.

The veteran observer fell silent at this point, and the Easy Chair
seized the occasion to remark: Yes, there is something in what you
say. But this stiffening of the tastes, this sclerosis of the mind, is
hardly an infectious disease

Ah, but it is infectious, the veteran observer exclaimed,
rousing himself, infectious as far as the victim can possibly make it
so. He wishes nothing so much as to impart his opinions in all their
rigidity to everybody else. Take your own case, for instance

No, we would rather not, the Easy Chair interposed.

But you must make the sacrifice, the veteran observer persisted.
You will allow that you are extremely opinionated?

Not at all.

Well, then, that you are devoutly conscientious in the tenure of
your aesthetic beliefs?

Something like that, yes.

And you cannot deny that in times past you have tried your best to
make others think with you?

It was our duty.

Well, let it pass for that. It amounted to an effort to make your
mental sclerosis infectious, and it was all the worse because, in you,
the stiffening of the tastes had taken the form of aversions rather
than preferences. You did not so much wish your readers to like your
favorite authors as to hate all the others. At the time when there was
a fad for making lists of The Hundred Best Authors, I always wondered
that you didn't put forth some such schedule.

We had the notion of doing something of the kind, the Easy Chair
confessed, but we could not think of more than ten or a dozen really
first-rate authors, and if we had begun to compile a list of the best
authors we should have had to leave out most of their works. Nearly all
the classics would have gone by the board. What havoc we should have
made with the British poets! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly
have fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not to a man.
Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser's poetry is
generally duller than the Presidents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's
time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse;
Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse;
Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed not to be
Shakespeare, is reading for martyrs; Dante's science and politics
outweigh his poetry a thousandfold, and so on through the whole
catalogue. Among the novelists

No, don't begin on the novelists! Every one knows your heresies
there, and would like to burn you along with the romances which I've no
doubt you would still commit to the flames. I see you are the Bourbon
of criticism; you have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But why
don't you turn your adamantine immutability to some practical account,
and give the world a list of The Hundred Worst Books?

Because a hundred books out of the worst would be a drop out of the
sea; there would remain an immeasurable welter of badness, of which we
are now happily ignorant, and from which we are safe, as long as our
minds are not turned to it by examples.

Ah, our visitor said, I see that you are afraid to confess
yourself the popular failure as a critic which you are. You are afraid
that if you made a list of The Hundred Worst Books you would send the
classes to buying them in the most expensive binding, and the masses to
taking them out of all the public libraries.

There is something in what you say, the Easy Chair confessed. Our
popular failure as a critic is notorious; it cannot be denied. The
stamp of our disapproval at one time gave a whole order of fiction a
currency that was not less than torrential. The flood of romantic
novels which passed over the land, and which is still to be traced in
the tatters of the rag-doll heroes and heroines caught in the memories
of readers along its course, was undoubtedly the effect of our adverse
criticism. No, we could not in conscience compile and publish a list of
The Hundred Worst Books; it would be contrary, for the reasons you
give, to public morals.

And don't you think, the observer said, with a Socratic subtlety
that betrayed itself in his gleaming eye, in the joyous hope of seeing
his victim fall into the pit that his own admissions had digged for
him, and don't you think that it would also bring to you the
unpleasant consciousness of having stiffened in your tastes?

It might up to a certain point, we consented. But we should
prefer to call it confirmed in our convictions. Wherever we have liked
or disliked in literature it has been upon grounds hardly
distinguishable from moral grounds. Bad art is a vice; untruth to
nature is the eighth of the seven deadly sins; a false school in
literature is a seminary of crime. We are speaking largely, of
course

Yes, we went on, all the ascertained veracities are immutable.
One holds to them, or, rather, they hold to one, with an indissoluble
tenacity. But convictions are in the region of character and are of
remote origin. In their safety one indulges one's self in expectations,
in tolerances, and these rather increase with the lapse of time. We
should say that your theory of the stiffening tastes is applicable to
the earlier rather than the later middle life. We should say that the
tastes if they stiffen at the one period limber at the other; their
forbidding rigidity is succeeded by an acquiescent suppleness. One is
aware of an involuntary hospitality toward a good many authors whom one
would once have turned destitute from the door, or with a dole of
Organized Charity meal-tickets at the best. But in that maturer time
one hesitates, and possibly ends by asking the stranger in, especially
if he is young, or even if he is merely new, and setting before him the
cold potato of a qualified approval. One says to him: 'You know I don't
think you are the real thing quite, but taking you on your own ground
you are not so bad. Come, you shall have a night's lodging at least,
and if you improve, if you show a tendency to change in the right
direction, there is no telling but you may be allowed to stay the week.
But you must not presume; you must not take this frosty welcome for an
effect of fire from the hearth where we sit with our chosen friends.'
Ten to one the stranger does not like this sort of talk, and goes his
waythe wrong way. But, at any rate, one has shown an open mind, a
liberal spirit; one has proved that one has not stiffened in one's
tastes; that one can make hopeful allowances in hopeful cases.

Such as? the observer insinuated.

Such as do not fit the point exactly. Very likely the case may be
that of an old or elderly author. It has been only within a year or two
that we have formed the taste for an English writer, no longer living,
save in his charming books. James Payn was a favorite with many in the
middle Victorian period, but it is proof of the flexibility of our
tastes that we have only just come to him. After shunning Anthony
Trollope for fifty years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, long
after our half-century was past. Now, James Payn is the solace of our
autumnal equinox, and Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a
recurrence surpassed only by our devotion to the truth as it is in the
fiction of the Divine Jane; and Jane Austen herself was not an idol of
our first or even our second youth, but became the cult of a time when
if our tastes had stiffened we could have cared only for the most
modern of the naturalists, and those preferably of the Russian and
Spanish schools. A signal proof of their continued suppleness came but
the other day when we acquainted ourselves with the work of the English
novelist, Mr. Percy White, and it was the more signal because we
perceived that he had formed himself upon a method of Thackeray's,
which recalled that master, as the occasional aberrations of Payn and
Trollope recall a manner of him. But it is Thackeray's most artistic
method which Mr. White recalls in his studies of scamps and snobs; he
allows them, as Thackeray allows Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell
their own stories, and in their unconsciousness of their own natures he
finds play for an irony as keen and graphic as anything in fiction. He
deals with the actual English world, and the pleasure he gave us was
such as to make us resolve to return to Thackeray's vision of his own
contemporaneous English world at the first opportunity. We have not
done so yet; but after we have fortified ourselves with a course of
Scott and Dickens, we are confident of being able to bear up under the
heaviest-handed satire of Vanity Fair. As for The Luck of
Barry Lyndon and The Yellowplush Papers, and such like, they
have never ceased to have their prime delight for us. But their
proportion is quite large enough to survive from any author for any
reader; as we are often saying, it is only in bits that authors
survive; their resurrection is not by the whole body, but here and
there a perfecter fragment. Most of our present likes and dislikes are
of the period when you say people begin to stiffen in their tastes. We
could count the authors by the score who have become our favorites in
that period, and those we have dropped are almost as many. It is not
necessary to say who they all are, but we may remark that we still
read, and read, and read again the poetry of Keats, and that we no
longer read the poetry of Alexander Smith. But it is through the growth
of the truly great upon his mature perception that the aging reader
finds novel excellences in them. It was only the other day that we
picked up Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, and realized in it, from a
chance page or two, a sardonic quality of insurpassable subtlety and
reach. This was something quite new to us in it. We had known the
terrible pathos of the story, its immeasurable tragedy, but that
deadly, quiet, pitiless, freezing irony of a witness holding himself
aloof from its course, and losing, for that page or two, the moralist
in the mere observer, was a revelation that had come to that time of
life in us when you think the tastes stiffen and one refuses new
pleasures because they are new.

Our visitor yawned visibly, audibly. And what is all this you have
been saying? You have made yourself out an extraordinary example of
what may be done by guarding against the stiffening of the tastes after
the end of second youth. But have you proved that there is no such
danger? Or was your idea simply to celebrate yourself? At moments I
fancied something like that.

We owned the stroke with an indulgent smile. No, not exactly that.
The truth is we have been very much interested by your notionif it
was yours, which is not altogether probableand we have been turning
its light upon our own experience, in what we should not so much call
self-celebration as self-exploitation. One uses one's self as the stuff
for knowledge of others, or for the solution of any given problem.
There is no other way of getting at the answers to the questions.

And what is your conclusion as to my notion, if it is mine? the
veteran observer asked, with superiority.

That there is nothing in it. The fact is that the tastes are never
so tolerant, so liberal, so generous, so supple as they are at that
time of life when they begin, according to your notion, to stiffen, to
harden, to contract. We have in this very period formed a new tasteor
taken a new lease of an old onefor reading history, which had been
dormant all through our first and second youth. We expect to see the
time when we shall read the Elizabethan dramatists with avidity. We may
not improbably find a delight in statistics; there must be a hidden
charm in them. We may even form a relish for the vagaries of
pseudo-psychology

At this point we perceived the veteran observer had vanished and
that we were talking to ourselves.

A Friend of the Easy Chair came in the other day after a frost from
the magazine editor which had nipped a tender manuscript in its bloom,
and was received with the easy hospitality we are able to show the
rejected from a function involving neither power nor responsibility.

Ah! we breathed, sadly, at the sight of the wilted offering in the
hands of our friend. What is it he won't take now?

Wait till I get my second wind, the victim of unrequited
literature answered, dropping into the Easy Chair, from which the
occupant had risen; and he sighed, pensively, I felt so sure I had got
him this time. He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against
the uncomfortably carven top of the Easy Chair. It was perhaps his
failure to find rest in it that restored him to animation. It is a
little thing, he murmured, on the decline of the vaudeville.

The decline of the vaudeville? we repeated, wrinkling our forehead
in grave misgiving. Then, for want of something better, we asked, Do
you think that is a very dignified subject for the magazine?

Why, bless my soul! the rejected one cried, starting somewhat
violently forward, what is your magazine itself but vaudeville, with
your contributors all doing their stunts of fiction, or poetry, or
travel, or sketches of life, or articles of popular science and
sociological interest, and I don't know what all! What are your
illustrations but the moving pictures of the kalatechnoscope! Why, he
said, with inspiration, what are you yourself but a species of Chaser
that comes at the end of the show, and helps clear the ground for the
next month's performance by tiring out the lingering readers?

You don't think, we suggested, you're being rather unpleasant?

Our friend laughed harshly, and we were glad to see him restored to
so much cheerfulness, at any rate. I think the notion is a pretty good
fit, though if you don't like to wear it I don't insist. Why should you
object to being likened to those poor fellows who come last on the
programme at the vaudeville? Very often they are as good as the others,
and sometimes, when I have determined to get my five hours' enjoyment
to the last moment before six o'clock, I have had my reward in
something unexpectedly delightful in the work of the Chasers. I have
got into close human relations with them, I and the half-dozen brave
spirits who have stuck it out with me, while the ushers went
impatiently about, clacking the seats back, and picking up the
programmes and lost articles under them. I have had the same sense of
kindly comradery with you, and now and then my patience has been
rewarded by you, just as it has been by the Chasers at the vaudeville,
and I've said so to people. I've said: 'You're wrong to put down the
magazine the way most of you do before you get to those departments at
the end. Sometimes there are quite good things in them.'

Really, said the unreal editor, you seem to have had these
remarks left over from your visit to the real editor. We advise you to
go back and repeat them. They may cause him to revise his opinion of
your contribution.

It's no use my going back. I read finality in his eye before I left
him, and I feel that no compliment, the most fulsome, would move him.
Don't turn me out! I take it all back about your being a Chaser. You
are the first act on the bill for me. I read the magazine like a
Chinese bookfrom the back. I always begin with the Easy Chair.

Ah, now you are talking, we said, and we thought it no more than
human to ask, What is it you have been saying about the vaudeville,
anyway?

The rejected one instantly unfolded his manuscript. I will just
read

No, no! we interposed. Tell us about itgive us the general
drift. We never can follow anything read to us.

The other looked incredulous, but he was not master of the
situation, and he resigned himself to the secondary pleasure of
sketching the paper he would so much rather have read.

Why, you know what an inveterate vaudeville-goer I have always
been?

We nodded. We know how you are always trying to get us to neglect
the masterpieces of our undying modern dramatists, on the legitimate
stage, and go with you to see the ridiculous stunts you delight in.

Well, it comes to the same thing. I am an inveterate
vaudeville-goer, for the simple reason that I find better acting in the
vaudeville, and better drama, on the whole, than you ever get, or you
generally get, on your legitimate stage. I don't know why it is so very
legitimate. I have no doubt but the vaudeville, or continuous variety
performance, is the older, the more authentic form of histrionic art.
Before the Greek dramatists, or the longer-winded Sanskrit playwrights,
or the exquisitely conventionalized Chinese and Japanese and Javanese
were heard of, it is probable that there were companies of vaudeville
artists going about the country and doing the turns that they had
invented themselves, and getting and giving the joy that comes of
voluntary and original work, just as they are now. And in the palmiest
days of the Greek tragedy or the Roman comedy, there were, of course,
variety shows all over Athens and Rome where you could have got twice
the amusement for half the money that you would at the regular
theatres. While the openly wretched and secretly rebellious actors whom
Euripides and Terence had cast for their parts were going through roles
they would never have chosen themselves, the wilding heirs of art at
the vaudeville were giving things of their own imagination, which they
had worked up from some vague inspiration into a sketch of artistic
effect. No manager had foisted upon them his ideals of 'what the people
wanted,' none had shaped their performance according to his own notion
of histrionics. They had each come to him with his or her little
specialty, that would play fifteen or twenty minutes, and had, after
trying it before him, had it rejected or accepted in its entirety.
Then, author and actor in one, they had each made his or her appeal to
the public.

There were no hers on the stage in those days, we interposed.

No matter, the rejected contributor retorted. There are now, and
that is the important matter. I am coming to the very instant of
actuality, to the show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have
brought my paper down to mention if it had been accepted. He drew a
long breath, and said, with a dreamy air of retrospect: It is all of a
charming unity, a tradition unbroken from the dawn of civilization.
When I go to a variety show, and drop my ticket into the chopping-box
at the door, and fastidiously choose my unreserved seat in the best
place I can get, away from interposing posts and persons, and settle
down to a long afternoon's delight, I like to fancy myself a
far-fetched phantom of the past, who used to do the same thing at
Thebes or Nineveh as many thousand years ago as you please. I like to
think that I too am an unbroken tradition, and my pleasure will be such
as shaped smiles immemorially gone to dust.

We made our reflection that this passage was probably out of the
rejected contribution, but we did not say anything, and our visitor
went on.

And what a lot of pleasure I did get, yesterday, for my fifty
cents! There were twelve stunts on the bill, not counting the
kalatechnoscope, and I got in before the first was over, so that I had
the immediate advantage of seeing a gifted fellow-creature lightly
swinging himself between two chairs which had their outer legs balanced
on the tops of caraffes full of water, and making no more of the feat
than if it were a walk in the Park or down Fifth Avenue. How I
respected that man! What study had gone to the perfection of that act,
and the others that he equally made nothing of! He was simply billed as
'Equilibrist,' when his name ought to have been blazoned in letters a
foot high if they were in any wise to match his merit. He was followed
by 'Twin Sisters,' who, as 'Refined Singers and Dancers,' appeared in
sweeping confections of white silk, with deeply drooping, widely
spreading white hats, and long-fringed white parasols heaped with
artificial roses, and sang a little tropical romance, whose burden was

'Under the bamboo-tree,'

brought in at unexpected intervals. They also danced this romance
with languid undulations, and before you could tell how or why, they
had disappeared and reappeared in short green skirts, and then shorter
white skirts, with steps and stops appropriate to their costumes, but
always, I am bound to say, of the refinement promised. I can't tell you
in what their refinement consisted, but I am sure it was there, just as
I am sure of the humor of the two brothers who next appeared as
'Singing and Dancing Comedians' of the coon type. I know that they sang
and they danced, and worked sable pleasantries upon one another with
the help of the pianist, who often helps out the dialogue of the stage
in vaudeville. They were not so good as the next people, a jealous
husband and a pretty wife, who seized every occasion in the slight
drama of 'The Singing Lesson,' and turned it to account in giving their
favorite airs. I like to have a husband disguise himself as a German
maestro, and musically make out why his wife is so zealous in studying
with him, and I do not mind in the least having the sketch close
without reason: it leaves something to my imagination. Two of
'America's Leading Banjoists' charmed me next, for, after all, there is
nothing like the banjo. If one does not one's self rejoice in its
plunking, there are others who do, and that is enough for my altruistic
spirit. Besides, it is America's leading instrument, and those who
excel upon it appeal to the patriotism which is never really dormant in
us. Its close association with color in our civilization seemed to
render it the fitting prelude of the next act, which consisted of
'Monologue and Songs' by a divine creature in lampblack, a shirt-waist
worn outside his trousers, and an exaggerated development of stomach.
What did he say, what did he sing? I don't know; I only know that it
rested the soul and brain, that it soothed the conscience, and appeased
the hungerings of ambition. Just to sit there and listen to that
unalloyed nonsense was better than to 'sport with Amaryllis in the
shade, or with the tangles of Neaera's hair,' or to be the object of a
votive dinner, or to be forgiven one's sins; there is no such complete
purgation of care as one gets from the real Afro-American when he is
unreal, and lures one completely away from life, while professing to
give his impressions of it. You, with your brute preferences for
literality, will not understand this, and I suppose you would say I
ought to have got a purer and higher joy out of the little passage of
drama, which followed, and I don't know but I did. It was nothing but
the notion of a hapless, half-grown girl, who has run away from the
poorhouse for a half-holiday, and brings up in the dooryard of an old
farmer of the codger type, who knew her father and mother. She at once
sings, one doesn't know why, 'Oh, dear, what can the matter be,' and
she takes out of her poor little carpet-bag a rag-doll, and puts it to
sleep with 'By low, baby,' and the old codger puts the other dolls to
sleep, nodding his head, and kicking his foot out in time, and he ends
by offering that poor thing a home with him. If he had not done it, I
do not know how I could have borne it, for my heart was in my throat
with pity, and the tears were in my eyes. Good heavens! What simple
instruments we men are! The falsest note in all Hamlet is in those
words of his to Guildenstern: 'You would play upon me; you would seem
to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you
would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.... 'S
blood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?'
Guildenstern ought to have said: 'Much, my lord! Here is an actor who
has been summering in the country, and has caught a glimpse of pathetic
fact commoner than the dust in the road, and has built it up in a bit
of drama as artless as a child would fancy, and yet it swells your
heart and makes you cry. Your mystery? You have no mystery to an honest
man. It is only fakes and frauds who do not understand the soul. The
simplest willow whistle is an instrument more complex than man.' That
is what I should have said in Guildenstern's place if I had had Hamlet
with me there at the vaudeville show.

In the pretty language of the playbill, the contributor went on,
this piece was called 'A Pastoral Playlet,' and I should have been
willing to see 'Mandy Hawkins' over again, instead of the 'Seals and
Sea Lions,' next placarded at the sides of the curtain immediately
lifted on them. Perhaps I have seen too much of seals, but I find the
range of their accomplishments limited, and their impatience for fish
and lump sugar too frankly greedy before and after each act. Their
banjo-playing is of a most casual and irrelevant sort; they ring bells,
to be sure; in extreme cases they fire small cannon; and their feat of
balancing large and little balls on their noses is beyond praise. But
it may be that the difficulties overcome are too obvious in their
instances; I find myself holding my breath, and helping them along too
strenuously for my comfort. I am always glad when the curtain goes down
on them; their mere flumping about the stage makes me unhappy; but they
are not so bad, after all, as trained dogs. They were followed by three
'Artistic European Acrobats,' who compensated and consoled me for the
seals, by the exquisite ease with which they wrought the
impossibilities of their art, in the familiar sack-coats and top-coats
of every day. I really prefer tights and spangles, but I will not
refuse impossibilities simply because they are performed, as our
diplomats are instructed to appear at European courts, in the ordinary
dress of a gentleman; it may even add a poignancy to the pleasure I own
so reluctantly.

There came another pair of 'Singers and Dancers,' and then a 'Trick
Cyclist,' but really I cannot stand trick cycling, now that plain
cycling, glory be! has so nearly gone out. As soon as the cyclist began
to make his wheel rear up on its hind leg and carry him round the stage
in that posture, I went away. But I had had enough without counting
him, though I left the kalatechnoscope, with its shivering and
shimmering unseen. I had had my fill of pleasure, rich and pure, such
as I could have got at no legitimate theatre in town, and I came away
opulently content.

We reflected awhile before we remarked: Then I don't see what you
have to complain of or to write of. Where does the decline of the
vaudeville come in?

Oh, the rejected contributor said, with a laugh, I forgot that.
It's still so good, when compared with the mechanical drama of the
legitimate theatre, that I don't know whether I can make out a case
against it now. But I think I can, both in quality and quantity. I
think the change began insidiously to steal upon the variety show with
the increasing predominance of short plays. Since they were short, I
should not have minded them so much, but they were always so bad!
Still, I could go out, when they came on, and return for the tramp
magician, or the comic musician, who played upon joints of stovepipe
and the legs of reception-chairs and the like, and scratched matches on
his two days' beard, and smoked a plaintive air on a cigarette. But
when the 'playlets' began following one another in unbroken succession,
I did not know what to do. Almost before I was aware of their purpose
three of the leading vaudeville houses threw off the mask, and gave
plays that took up the whole afternoon; and though they professed to
intersperse the acts with what they called 'big vaudeville,' I could
not be deceived, and I simply stopped going. When I want to see a
four-act play, I will go to the legitimate theatre, and see something
that I can smell, too. The influence of the vaudeville has, on the
whole, been so elevating and refining that its audiences cannot stand
either the impurity or the imbecility of the fashionable drama. But now
the vaudeville itself is beginning to decline in quality as well as
quantity.

Not toward immodesty?

No, not so much that. But the fine intellectual superiority of the
continuous performance is beginning to suffer contamination from the
plays where there are waits between the acts. I spoke just now of the
tramp magician, but I see him no longer at the variety houses. The
comic musician is of the rarest occurrence; during the whole season I
have as yet heard no cornet solo on a revolver or a rolling-pin. The
most dangerous acts of the trapeze have been withdrawn. The acrobats
still abound, but it is three long years since I looked upon a coon act
with real Afro-Americans in it, or saw a citizen of Cincinnati in a fur
overcoat keeping a silk hat, an open umbrella, and a small wad of paper
in the air with one hand. It is true that the conquest of the
vaudeville houses by the full-fledged drama has revived the
old-fashioned stock companies in many cases, and has so far worked for
good, but it is a doubtful advantage when compared with the loss of the
direct inspiration of the artists who created and performed their
stunts.

Delightful word! we dreamily noted. How did it originate?

Oh, I don't know. It's probably a perversion of stint, a task or
part, which is also to be found in the dictionary as stent. What does
it matter? There is the word, and there is the thing, and both are
charming. I approve of the stunt because it is always the stuntist's
own. He imagined it, he made it, and he loves it. He seems never to be
tired of it, even when it is bad, and when nobody in the house lends
him a hand with it. Of course, when it comes to that, it has to go, and
he with it. It has to go when it is good, after it has had its day,
though I don't see why it should go; for my part there are stunts I
could see endlessly over again, and not weary of them. Can you say as
much of any play?

Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, we suggested.

That is true. But without the music? And even with the music, the
public won't have them any longer. I would like to see the stunt fully
developed. I should like to have that lovely wilding growth delicately
nurtured into drama as limitless and lawless as life itself, owing no
allegiance to plot, submitting to no rule or canon, but going gayly on
to nothingness as human existence does, full of gleaming lights, and
dark with inconsequent glooms, musical, merry, melancholy, mad, but
never-ending as the race itself.

You would like a good deal more than you are ever likely to get,
we said; and here we thought it was time to bring our visitor to book
again. But about the decline of vaudeville?

Well, it isn't grovelling yet in the mire with popular fiction, but
it is standing still, and whatever is standing still is going backward,
or at least other things are passing it. To hold its own, the
vaudeville must grab something more than its own. It must venture into
regions yet unexplored. It must seize not only the fleeting moments,
but the enduring moments of experience; it should be wise not only to
the whims and moods, but the passions, the feelings, the natures of
men; for it appeals to a public not sophisticated by mistaken ideals of
art, but instantly responsive to representations of life. Nothing is
lost upon the vaudeville audience, not the lightest touch, not the
airiest shadow of meaning. Compared with the ordinary audience at the
legitimate theatres

Then what you wish, we concluded, is to elevate the vaudeville.

The visitor got himself out of the Easy Chair, with something
between a groan and a growl. You mean to kill it.

Whether pleasure of the first experience is more truly pleasure than
that which comes rich in associations from pleasures of the past is a
doubt that no hedonistic philosopher seems to have solved yet. We
should, in fact, be sorry if any had, for in that case we should be
without such small occasion as we now have to suggest it in the
forefront of a paper which will not finally pass beyond the suggestion.
When the reader has arrived at our last word we can safely promise him
he will still have the misgiving we set out with, and will be confirmed
in it by the reflection that no pleasure, either of the earliest or the
latest experience, can be unmixed with pain. One will be fresher than
the other; that is all; but it is not certain that the surprise will
have less of disappointment in it than the unsurprise. In the one case,
the case of youth, say, there will be the racial disappointment to
count with, and in the other, the case of age, there will be the
personal disappointment, which is probably a lighter thing. The racial
disappointment is expressed in what used to be called, somewhat
untranslatably, Weltschmerz. This was peculiarly the appanage of
youth, being the anticipative melancholy, the pensive foreboding,
distilled from the blighted hopes of former generations of youth. Mixed
with the effervescent blood of the young heart, it acted like a subtle
poison, and eventuated in more or less rhythmical deliriums, in cynical
excesses of sentiment, in extravagances of behavior, in effects which
commonly passed when the subject himself became ancestor, and
transmitted his inherited burden of Weltschmerz to his
posterity. The old are sometimes sad, on account of the sins and
follies they have personally committed and know they will commit again,
but for pure gloomgloom positive, absolute, all but palpableyou
must go to youth. That is not merely the time of disappointment, it is
in itself disappointment; it is not what it expected to be; and it
finds nothing which confronts it quite, if at all, responsive to the
inward vision. The greatest, the loveliest things in the world lose
their iridescence or dwindle before it. The old come to things
measurably prepared to see them as they are, take them for what they
are worth; but the young are the prey of impassioned prepossessions
which can never be the true measures.

* * * * *

The disadvantage of an opening like this is that it holds the same
quality, if not quantity, of disappointment as those other sublime
things, and we earnestly entreat the reader to guard himself against
expecting anything considerable from it. Probably the inexperienced
reader has imagined from our weighty prologue something of signal
importance to follow; but the reader who has been our reader through
thick and thin for many years will have known from the first that we
were not going to deal with anything more vital, say, than a few
emotions and memories, prompted, one night of the other winter, by
hearing one of the old-fashioned Italian operas which a more than
commonly inspired management had been purveying to an over-Wagnered
public. In fact, we had a sense that this sort of reader was there with
us the night we saw L'Elisir d'Amore, and that it was in his
personality we felt and remembered many things which we could have
fancied personal only to ourselves.

He began to take the affair out of our keeping from the first
moment, when, after passing through the crowd arriving from the snowy
street, we found our way through the distracted vestibule of the
opera-house into the concentred auditorium and hushed ourselves in the
presence of the glowing spectacle of the stage. Ah, this is the real
thing, he whispered, and he would not let us, at any moment when we
could have done so without molesting our neighbors, censure the
introduction of Alpine architecture in the entourage of an Italian
village piazza. It is a village at the foot of the Alps probably, he
said, and if not, no matter. It is as really the thing as all the
rest: as the chorus of peasants and soldiers, of men and women who
impartially accompany the orchestra in the differing sentiments of the
occasion; as the rivals who vie with one another in recitative and
aria; as the heroine who holds them both in a passion of suspense while
she weaves the enchantment of her trills and runs about them; as the
whole circumstance of the divinely impossible thing which defies nature
and triumphs over prostrate probability. What does a little Swiss
Gothic matter? The thing is always opera, and it is always Italy. I was
thinking, as we crowded in there from the outside, with our lives in
our hands, through all those trolleys and autos and carriages and cabs
and sidewalk ticket-brokers, of the first time I saw this piece. It was
in Venice, forty-odd years ago, and I arrived at the theatre in a
gondola, slipping to the water-gate with a waft of the gondolier's oar
that was both impulse and arrest, and I was helped up the sea-weedy,
slippery steps by a beggar whom age and sorrow had bowed to just the
right angle for supporting my hand on the shoulder he lent it. The
blackness of the tide was pierced with the red plunge of a few lamps,
and it gurgled and chuckled as my gondola lurched off and gave way to
another; and when I got to my boxa box was two florins, but I could
afford itI looked down on just this scene, over a pit full of
Austrian officers and soldiers, and round on a few Venetians darkling
in the other boxes and half-heartedly enjoying the music. It was the
most hopeless hour of the Austrian occupation, and the air was heavy
with its oppression and tobacco, for the officers smoked between the
acts. It was only the more intensely Italian for that; but it was not
more Italian than this; and when I see those impossible people on the
stage, and hear them sing, I breathe an atmosphere that is like the
ether beyond the pull of our planet, and is as far from all its laws
and limitations.

* * * * *

Our friend continued to talk pretty well through the whole interval
between the first and second acts; and we were careful not to interrupt
him, for from the literary quality of his diction we fancied him
talking for publication, and we wished to take note of every turn of
his phrase.

It's astonishing, he said, how little art needs in order to give
the effect of life. A touch here and there is enough; but art is so
conditioned that it has to work against time and space, and is obliged
to fill up and round out its own body with much stuff that gives no
sense of life. The realists, he went on, were only half right.

Isn't it better to be half right than wrong altogether? we
interposed.

I'm not sure. What I wanted to express is that every now and then I
find in very defective art of all kinds that mere look of the
real thing which suffices. A few words of poetry glance from the prose
body of verse and make us forget the prose. A moment of dramatic motive
carries hours of heavy comic or tragic performance. Is any piece of
sculpture or painting altogether good? Or isn't the spectator held in
the same glamour which involved the artist before he began the work,
and which it is his supreme achievement to impart, so that it shall
hide all defects? When I read what you wrote the other month, or the
other year, about the vaudeville shows?

Hush! we entreated. Don't bring those low associations into this
high presence.

Why not? It is all the same thing. There is no inequality in the
region of art; and I have seen things on the vaudeville stage which
were graced with touches of truth so exquisite, so ideally fine, that I
might have believed I was getting them at first hand and pure from the
street-corner. Of course, the poor fellows who had caught them from
life had done their worst to imprison them in false terms, to labor
them out of shape, and build them up in acts where anything less
precious would have been lost; but they survived all that and gladdened
the soul. I realized that I should have been making a mistake if I had
required any 'stunt' which embodied them to be altogether composed of
touches of truth, of moments of life. We can stand only a very little
radium; the captured sunshine burns with the fires that heat the
summers of the farthest planets; and we cannot handle the miraculous
substance as if it were mere mineral. A touch of truth is perhaps not
only all we need, but all we can endure in any one example of art.

You are lucky if you get so much, we said, even at a vaudeville
show.

Or at an opera, he returned, and then the curtain rose on the
second act. When it fell again, he resumed, as if he had been
interrupted in the middle of a sentence. What should you say was the
supreme moment of this thing, or was the radioactive property, the very
soul? Of course, it is there where Nemorino drinks the elixir and finds
himself freed from Adina; when he bursts into the joyous song of
liberation and gives that delightful caper

and which not uncommonly results from a philter composed entirely of
claret. When Adina advances in the midst of his indifference and breaks
into the lyrical lament

'Neppur mi guarda!'

she expresses the mystery of the sex which can be best provoked to
love by the sense of loss, and the vital spark of the opera is kindled.
The rest is mere incorporative material. It has to be. In other
conditions the soul may be disembodied, and we may have knowledge of it
without the interposition of anything material; but if there are
spiritual bodies as there are material bodies, still the soul may wrap
itself from other souls and emit itself only in gleams. But putting all
that aside, I should like to bet that the germ, the vital spark of the
opera, felt itself life, felt itself flame, first of all in that
exquisite moment of release which Nemorino's caper conveys. Till then
it must have been rather blind groping, with nothing better in hand
than that old, worn-out notion of a love-philter. What will you bet?

We never bet, we virtuously replied. We are principled against it
in all cases where we feel sure of losing; though in this case we could
never settle it, for both composer and librettist are dead.

Yes, isn't it sad that spirits so gay should be gone from a world
that needs gayety so much? That is probably the worst of death; it is
so indiscriminate, the reader thoughtfully observed.

But aren't you, we asked, getting rather far away from the
question whether the pleasure of experience isn't greater than the
pleasure of inexperiencewhether later operas don't give more joy than
the first?

Was that the question? he returned. I thought it was whether
Italian opera was not as much at home in exile as in its native land.

Well, make it that, we responded, tolerantly.

Oh no, he met us half-way. But it naturalizes itself everywhere.
They have it in St. Petersburg and in Irkutsk, for all I know, and
certainly in Calcutta and Australia, the same as in Milan and Venice
and Naples, or as here in New York, where everything is so much at
home, or so little. It's the most universal form of art.

Is it? Why more so than sculpture or painting or architecture?

Our demand gave the reader pause. Then he said: I think it is more
immediately universal than the other forms of art. These all want time
to denationalize themselves. It is their nationality which first
authorizes them to be; but it takes decades, centuries sometimes, for
them to begin their universal life. It seems different with operas.
'Cavalleria Rusticana' was as much at home with us in its first year as
'L'Elisir d'Amore' is now in its sixtieth or seventieth.

But it isn't, we protested, denationalized. What can be more
intensely Italian than an Italian opera is anywhere?

You're right, the reader owned, as the reader always must, if
honest, in dealing with the writer. It is the operatic audience, not
the opera, which is denationalized when the opera becomes universal. We
are all Italians here to-night. I only wish we were in our native land,
listening to this musical peal of ghostly laughter from the past.

* * * * *

The reader was silent a moment while the vast house buzzed and
murmured and babbled from floor to roof. Perhaps the general note of
the conversation, if it could have been tested, would have been found
voluntary rather than spontaneous; but the sound was gay, and there
could be no question of the splendor of the sight. We may decry our own
almost as much as we please, but there is a point where we must cease
to depreciate ourselves; even for the sake of evincing our superiority
to our possessions, we must not undervalue some of them. One of these
is the Metropolitan Opera House, where the pride of wealth, the vanity
of fashion, the beauty of youth, and the taste and love of music fill
its mighty cup to the brim in the proportions that they bear to one
another in the community. Wherever else we fail of our ideal, there we
surely realize it on terms peculiarly our own. Subjectively the scene
is intensely responsive to the New York spirit, and objectively it is
most expressive of the American character in that certain surface
effect of thin brilliancy which remains with the spectator the most
memorable expression of its physiognomy.

No doubt something like this was in the reader's mind when he
resumed, with a sigh: It's rather pathetic how much more magnificently
Italian opera has always been circumstanced in exile than at home. It
had to emigrate in order to better its fortunes; it could soon be
better seen if not heard outside of Italy than in its native country.
It was only where it could be purely conventional as well as ideal that
it could achieve its greatest triumphs. It had to make a hard fight for
its primacy among the amusements that flatter the pride as well as
charm the sense. You remember how the correspondents of Mr. Spectator
wrote to him in scorn of the affected taste of 'the town' when the town
in London first began to forsake the theatre and to go to the opera?

Yes, they were very severe on the town for pretending to a pleasure
imparted in a language it could not understand a word of. They had all
the reason on their side, and they needed it; but the opera is
independent of reason, and the town felt that for its own part it could
dispense with reason, too. The town can always do that. It would not go
seriously or constantly to English opera, though ever so much invited
to do so, for all the reasons, especially the patriotic reasons. Isn't
it strange, by-the-way, how English opera is a fashion, while Italian
opera remains a passion? We had it at its best, didn't we, in the
Gilbert and Sullivan operas, which were the most charming things in the
world; but they charmed only for a while, and it may be doubted whether
they ever greatly charmed the town. The manager of the Metropolitan
replaces German with Italian opera, and finds his account in it, but
could he find his account in it if he put on 'The Mikado' instead of
'L'Elisir d'Amore'? If he did so, the town would not be here. Why?

The reader did not try to answer at once. He seemed to be thinking,
but perhaps he was not; other readers may judge from his reply, which,
when it came, was this: There seems to be something eternally as well
as universally pleasing in Italian opera; but what the thing is, or how
much of a thing it is, I wouldn't undertake to say. Possibly the fault
of English opera is its actuality. It seizes upon a contemporaneous
mood or fad, and satirizes it; but the Italian opera at its lightest
deals with a principle of human nature, and it is never satirical; it
needn't be, for it is as independent of the morals as of the reasons.
It isn't obliged, by the terms of its existence, to teach, any more
than it is obliged to convince. It's the most absolute thing in the
world; and from its unnatural height it can stoop at will in moments of
enrapturing naturalness without ever losing poise. Wasn't that
delightful where Caruso hesitated about his encore, and then, with a
shrug and a waft of his left hand to the house, went off in order to
come back and give his aria with more effect? That was a touch of
naturalness not in the scheme of the opera.

Yes, but it was more racial, more personal, than natural. It was
delicious, but we are not sure we approved of it.

Ah, in Italian opera you're not asked to approve; you're only
desired to enjoy!

Well, then that bit of racial personality was of the effect of
actuality, and it jarred.

Perhaps you're right, the reader sighed, but he added: It was
charming; yes, it made itself part of the piece. Nemorino would have
done just as Caruso did.

At the last fall of the curtain the reader and the writer rose in
unison, a drop of that full tide of life which ebbed by many channels
out of the vast auditorium, and in two or three minutes left it dry.
They stayed in their duplex personality to glance at the silken
evanescences from the boxes, and then, being in the mood for the best
society, they joined the shining presences in the vestibule where these
waited for their carriages and automobiles. Of this company the
interlocutors felt themselves so inseparably part that they could with
difficulty externate themselves so far as to observe that it was of the
quality of the town which had gone to Italian opera from the first.

In Mr. Spectator's time the town would have been lighted by the
smoky torches of linkboys to its chairs; now it was called to its
electric autos in the blaze of a hundred incandescent bulbs; but the
difference was not enough to break the tradition. There was something
in the aspect of that patrician throng, as it waited the turn of each,
which struck the reader and writer jointly as a novel effect from any
American crowd, but which the writer scarcely dares intimate to the
general reader, for the general reader is much more than generally a
woman, and she may not like it. Perhaps we can keep it from offending
by supposing that the fact can be true only of the most elect socially,
but in any case the fact seemed to be that the men were handsomer than
the women. They were not only handsomer, but they were sweller (if we
may use a comparative hitherto unachieved) in look, and even in dress.

How this could have happened in a civilization so peculiarly devoted
as ours to the evolution of female beauty and style is a question which
must be referred to scientific inquiry. It does not affect the vast
average of woman's loveliness and taste among us in ranks below the
very highest; this remains unquestioned and unquestionable; and
perhaps, in the given instance, it was an appearance and not a fact, or
perhaps the joint spectator was deceived as to the supreme social value
of those rapidly dwindling and dissolving groups.

The reader and the writer were some time in finding their true
level, when they issued into the common life of the street, and they
walked home as much like driving home as they could. On the way the
reader, who was so remotely lost in thought that the writer could
scarcely find him, made himself heard in a musing suspiration: There
was something missing. Can you think what it was?

Yes, certainly; there was no ballet.

Ah, to be sure: no ballet! And there used always to be a ballet!
You remember, the reader said, how beatific it always was to have the
minor coryphees subside in nebulous ranks on either side of the stage,
and have the great planetary splendor of the prima ballerina
come swiftly floating down the centre to the very footlights, beaming
right and left? Ah, there's nothing in life now like that radiant
moment! But even that was eclipsed when she rose on tiptoe and stubbed
it down the scene on the points of her slippers, with the soles of her
feet showing vertical in the act. Why couldn't we have had that
to-night? Yes, we have been cruelly wronged.

But you don't give the true measure of our injury. You forget that
supreme instant when the master-spirit of the ballet comes skipping
suddenly forward, and leaping into the air with calves that exchange a
shimmer of kisses, and catches the prima ballerina at the waist,
and tosses her aloft, and when she comes down supports her as she bends
this way and that way, and all at once stiffens for her bow to the
house. Think of our having been defrauded of that!

Yes, we have been wickedly defrauded. The reader was silent for a
while, and then he said: I wonder if anybody except the choreographic
composer ever knew what the story of any ballet was? Were you ever able
to follow it?

Certainly not. It is bad enough following the opera. All that one
wishes to do in one case is to look, just as in the other case all one
wishes to do is to listen. We would as lief try to think out the full
meaning of a Browning poem in the pleasure it gave us, as to mix our
joy in the opera or the ballet with any severe question of their
purport.

The satirical reader introduced himself with a gleam in his eye
which kindled apprehension in the unreal editor's breast, and perhaps
roused in him a certain guilty self-consciousness.

I didn't know, the reader said, that you were such a
well-appointed arbiter elegantiarum.

Meaning our little discourse last month on the proper form of
addressing letters? the editor boldly grappled with the insinuation.
Oh yes; etiquette is part of our function. We merely hadn't got round
to the matter before. You liked our remarks?

Very much, our visitor said, with the fine irony characteristic of
him. All the more because I hadn't expected that sort of thing of you.
What I have expected of you hitherto was something more of the major
morality.

But the large-sized morals did not enter into that scheme. We deal
at times with the minor morality, too, if the occasion demands, as we
have suggested. You should not have been surprised to find politeness,
as well as righteousness, advocated or applauded here. Naturally, of
course, we prefer the larger-sized morals as questions for discussion.
Had you one of the larger-sized questions of morality to present?

I was thinking it was a larger-sized question of manners.

For example.

The experience of one of those transatlantic celebrities who seem
to be rather multiplying upon us of late, and who come here with a
proclamation of their worship of American women ready to present, as if
in print, to the swarming interviewers on the pier, and who then
proceed to find fault with our civilization on every other point,
almost before they drive up to their hotels.

But isn't that rather an old story?

I suppose it is rather old, but it always interests us; we are
never free from that longing for a flattered appearance in the eyes of
others which we so seldom achieve. This last, or next to last,
celebrityin the early winter it is impossible to fix their swift
successionseems to have suffered amaze at the rude behavior of some
dairymaids in the milk-room of the lady who was showing the celebrity
over her premises. I didn't understand the situation very clearly. The
lady must have been a lady farmer, in order to have a milk-room with
dairymaids in it; but in any case the fact is that when the lady
entered with the celebrity the maids remained seated, where they were
grouped together, instead of rising and standing in the presence of
their superiors, as they would have done in the hemisphere that the
celebrity came from.

Well, what came of it?

Oh, nothing. It was explained to the celebrity that the maids did
not rise because they felt themselves as good as their mistress and her
guest, and saw no reason for showing them a servile deference: that
this was the American ideal.

In the minds of those Swedish, Irish, English, Polish, German, or
Bohemian dairymaids, we murmured, dreamily, and when our reader roused
us from our muse with a sharp What? we explained, Of course they
were not American dairymaids, for it stands to reason that if they were
dairymaids they could not be Americans, or if Americans they could not
be dairymaids.

True, our friend assented, but all the same you admit that they
were behaving from an American ideal?

Yes.

Well, that ideal is what the celebrity objects to. The celebrity
doesn't like iton very high grounds.

The grounds of social inequality, the inferiority of those who work
to those who pay, and the right of the superiors to the respect of the
inferiors?

No, the politeness due from one class to another.

Such as lives between classes in Europe, we suppose. Well, that is
very interesting. Is it of record that the lady and her guest, on going
into the milk-room where the dairymaids remained rudely seated, bowed
or nodded to them or said, 'Good-day, young ladies'?

No, that is not of record.

Their human quality, their human equality, being altogether out of
the question, was probably in no wise recognized. Why, then, should
they have recognized the human quality of their visitors? Our
satirical reader was silent, and we went on. There is something very
droll in all that. We suppose you have often been vexed, or even
outraged, by the ingratitude of the waiter whom you had given a
handsome tip, over and above the extortionate charge of the house, and
who gathered up your quarter or half-dollar and slipped it into his
pocket without a word, or even an inarticulate murmur, of thanks?

Often. Outraged is no word for it.

Yes, we assented, feeling our way delicately. Has it ever
happened that in the exceptional case where the waiter has said, 'Thank
you very much,' or the like, you have responded with a cordial, 'You're
welcome,' or, 'Not at all'?

Certainly not.

Why not?

Becausebecausethose are terms of politeness between

Our friend hesitated, and we interrogatively supplied the word,
Equals? There are always difficulties between unequals. But try this,
some day, and see what a real gratitude you will get from the waiter.
It isn't infallible, but the chances are he will feel that you have
treated him like a man, and will do or say something to show his
feeling: he will give a twitch to your under-coat when he has helped
you on with your top-coat, which will almost pull you over. We have
even tried saying 'You are welcome' to a beggar. It's astonishing how
they like it. By-the-way, have you the habit of looking at your waiter
when he comes to take your order; or do you let him stand facing you,
without giving him a glance above the lower button of his poor, greasy
waistcoat?

No, the theory is that he is part of the mechanism of the
establishment.

That is the theory. But it has its inconveniences. We ourselves
used to act upon it, but often, when we found him long in bringing our
order, we were at a loss which waiter to ask whether it would be ready
some time during the evening; and occasionally we have blown up the
wrong waiter, who did not fail to bring us to shame for our error.

They do look so confoundedly alike, our visitor said,
thoughtfully.

We others look confoundedly alike to them, no doubt. If they
studied us as little as we study them, if they ignored us as
contemptuously as we do them, upon the theory that we, too, are part of
the mechanism, the next man would be as likely as we to get our
dinner.

They are paid to study us, our visitor urged.

Ah, paid! The intercourse of unequals is a commercial
transaction, but when the inferiors propose to make it purely so the
superiors object: they want something to boot, something thrown in,
some show of respect, some appearance of gratitude. Perhaps those
dairymaids did not consider that they were paid to stand up when their
employer and the visiting celebrity came into the milk-room, and so,
unless they were civilly recognizedwe don't say they weren't in this
casethey thought they would do some of the ignoring, too. It is
surprising how much the superiors think they ought to get for their
money from the inferiors in that commercial transaction. For instance,
they think they buy the right to call their inferiors by their first
names, but they don't think they sell a similar right with regard to
themselves. They call them Mary and John, but they would be surprised
and hurt if the butler and waitress addressed them as Mary and John.
Yet there is no reason for their surprise. Do you remember in
that entrancing and edifying comedy of 'Arms and the Man'Mr. Bernard
Shaw's very best, as we thinkthe wild Bulgarian maid calls the
daughter of the house by her Christian name? 'But you mustn't do that,'
the mother of the house instructs her. 'Why not?' the girl demands. '
She calls me Louka.'

Capital! our friend agreed. But, of course, Shaw doesn't mean
it.

You never can tell whether he means a thing or not. We think he
meant in this case, as Ibsen means in all cases, that you shall look
where you stand.

Our satirist seemed to have lost something of his gayety. Aren't
you taking the matter a little too seriously?

Perhaps. But we thought you wanted us to be more serious than we
were about addressing letters properly. This is the larger-sized
morality, the real No. 11 sort, and you don't like it, though you said
you expected it of us.

Oh, but I do like it, though just at present I hadn't expected it.
But if you're in earnest you must admit that the lower classes with us
are abominably rude. Now, I have the fancyperhaps from living on the
Continent a good deal in early life, where I formed the habitof
saying good-morning to the maid or the butler when I come down. But
they never seem to like it, and I can't get a good-morning back unless
I dig it out of them. I don't want them to treat me as a superior; I
only ask to be treated as an equal.

We have heard something like that before, but we doubt it. What you
really want is to have your condescension recognized; they feel
that, if they don't know it. Besides, their manners have been
formed by people who don't ask good-morning from them; they are so used
to being treated as if they were not there that they cannot realize
they are there. We have heard city people complain of the wane
of civility among country people when they went to them in the summer
to get the good of their country air. They say that the natives no
longer salute them in meeting, but we never heard that this happened
when they first saluted the natives. Try passing the time of day with
the next farmer you meet on a load of wood, and you will find that the
old-fashioned civility is still to be had for the asking. But it won't
be offered without the asking; the American who thinks from your dress
and address that you don't regard him as an equal will not treat you as
one at the risk of a snub; and he is right. As for domesticsor
servants, as we insolently call themtheir manners are formed on their
masters', and are often very bad. But they are not always bad. We, too,
have had that fancy of yours for saying good-morning when we come down;
it doesn't always work, but it oftener works than not. A friend of ours
has tried some such civility at others' houses: at his host's house
when the door was opened to him, arriving for dinner, and he was
gloomily offered a tiny envelope with the name of the lady he was to
take out. At first it surprised, but when it was imagined to be well
meant it was apparently liked; in extreme cases it led to note of the
weather; the second or third time at the same house it established
something that would have passed, with the hopeful spectator, for a
human relation. Of course, you can't carry this sort of thing too far.
You can be kind, but you must not give the notion that you do not know
your place.

To be sure. But come to think of it, why shouldn't you? What is it
in domestic employ that degrades, that makes us stigmatize it as
'service'? As soon as you get out-of-doors the case changes. You must
often have seen ladies fearfully snubbed by their coachmen; and as for
chauffeurs, who may kill you or somebody else at any moment, the mental
attitude of the average automobilaire toward them must be one of abject
deference. But there have been some really heroic, some almost
seraphic, efforts to readjust the terms of a relation that seems to
have something essentially odious in it. In the old times, the times of
the simple life now passed forever, when the daughter of one family
'lived out' in another, she ate with the family and shared alike with
them. She was their help, but she became their hindrance when she
insisted upon the primitive custom after 'waiting at table' had passed
the stage when the dishes were all set down, and the commensals 'did
their own stretching.' Heroes and seraphs did their utmost to sweeten
and soften the situation, but the unkind tendency could not be stayed.
The daughter of the neighbor who 'lived out' became 'the hired girl,'
and then she became the waitress, especially when she was of neighbors
beyond seas; and then the game was up. Those who thought humanely of
the predicament and wished to live humanely in it tried one thing and
tried another. That great soul of H.D.L., one of the noblest and wisest
of our economic reformers, now gone to the account which any might envy
him, had a usage which he practised with all guests who came to his
table. Before they sat down he or his wife said, looking at the maid
who was to serve the dinner, 'This is our friend, Miss Murphy'; and
then the guests were obliged in some sort to join the host and hostess
in recognizing the human quality of the attendant. It was going rather
far, but we never heard that any harm came of it. Some thought it
rather odd, but most people thought it rather nice.

And you advocate the general adoption of such a custom? our friend
asked, getting back to the sarcasm of his opening note. Suppose a
larger dinner, a fashionable dinner, with half a dozen men waiters?
That sort of thing might do at the table of a reformer, which only the
more advanced were invited to; but it wouldn't work with the average
retarded society woman or clubman.

What good thing works with them? we retorted, spiritedly.
But no, the custom would not be readily adopted even among enlightened
thinkers. We do not insist upon it; the men and the maids might object;
they might not like knowing the kind of people who are sometimes asked
to quite good houses. To be sure, they are not obliged to recognize
them out of the house.

But what, our friend asked, has all this got to do with the
question of 'the decent respect' due from domestics, as you prefer to
call them, to their employers?

As in that case of the dairymaids which we began with? But why was
any show of respect due from them? Was it nominated in the bond that
for their four or five dollars a week they were to stand up when their
'mistress' and her 'company' entered the room? Why, in fine, should any
human being respect another, seeing what human beings generally are? We
may love one another, but respect! No, those maids might, and
probably did, love their mistress; but they felt that they could show
their love as well sitting down as standing up. They would not stand up
to show their love for one another.

Then you think there is some love lost between the master and man
or mistress and maid nowadays, our beaten antagonist feebly sneered.

The masters and mistresses may not, but the men and maids may, have
whole treasures of affection ready to lavish at the first sign of a
desire for it; they do not say so, for they are not very articulate. In
the mean time the masters and mistresses want more than they have paid
for. They want honor as well as obedience, respect as well as love, the
sort of thing that money used to buy when it was worth more than it is
now. Well, they won't get it. They will get it less and less as time
goes on. Whatever the good new times may bring, they won't bring back
the hypocritical servility of the good old times. They

We looked round for our visiting reader, but he had faded back into
the millions of readers whom we are always addressing in print.

A visitor of the Easy Chair who seemed to have no conception of his
frequency, and who was able to supply from his imagination the welcome
which his host did not always hurry to offer him, found a place for
himself on the window-sill among the mistaken MSS. sent in the delusion
that the editor of the Chair was the editor of the magazine.

I have got a subject for you, he said.

Have you ever heard, we retorted, of carrying coals to Newcastle?
What made you think we wanted a subject?

Merely that perfunctory air of so many of your disquisitions. I
should think you would feel the want yourself. Your readers all feel it
for you.

Well, we can tell you, we said, that there could be no greater
mistake. We are turning away subjects from these premises every day.
They come here, hat in hand, from morning till night, asking to be
treated; and after dark they form a Topic Line at our door, begging for
the merest pittance of a notice, for the slightest allusion, for the
most cursory mention. Do you know that there are at least two hundred
thousand subjects in this town out of a job now? If you have got a
subject, you had better take it to the country press; the New York
magazines and reviews are overstocked with them; the newspapers,
morning and evening, are simply inundated with subjects; subjects are
turned down every Sunday in the pulpits; they cannot get standing-room
in the theatres. Why, we have just this moment dismissed a subject of
the first interest. Have you heard how at a late suffrage meeting one
lady friend of votes for women declared herself an admirer of
monarchies because they always gave women more recognition, more honor,
than republics?

No, I haven't, our visitor said.

Well, it happened, we affirmed. But every nook and cranny of our
brain was so full of subjects that we simply could not give this a
moment's consideration, and we see that all the other editors in New
York were obliged to turn the cold shoulder to it, though they must
have felt, as we did, that it was of prime importance.

From a position of lounging ease our visitor sat up, and began to
nurse one of his knees between his clasped hands. But if, he asked,
you had been able to consider the subject, what should you have said?

There are a great many ways of considering a subject like that, we
replied. We might have taken the serious attitude, and inquired how
far the female mind, through the increasing number of Anglo-American
marriages in our international high life, has become honeycombed with
monarchism. We might have held that the inevitable effect of such
marriages was to undermine the republican ideal at the very source of
the commonwealth's existence, and by corrupting the heart of American
motherhood must have weakened the fibre of our future citizenship to
the point of supinely accepting any usurpation that promised ranks and
titles and the splendor of court life.

Wouldn't you have been rather mixing your metaphors? our visitor
asked, with an air of having followed us over a difficult country.

In a cause like that, no patriotic publicist would have minded
mixing his metaphors. He would have felt that the great thing was to
keep his motives pure; and in treating such a subject our motives would
have remained the purest, whatever became of our metaphors. At the same
time this would not have prevented our doing justice to the position
taken by that friend of votes for women. We should have frankly
acknowledged that there was a great deal to be said for it, and that
republics had hitherto been remiss in not officially acknowledging the
social primacy of woman, but, in fact, distinctly inviting her to a
back seat in public affairs. We should then have appealed to our
thoughtful readers to give the matter their most earnest attention, and
with the conservatism of all serious inquirers we should have urged
them to beware of bestowing the suffrage on a class of the community
disposed so boldly to own its love of the splendors of the state. Would
it be sage, would it be safe, to indulge with democratic equality a sex
which already had its eyes on the flattering inequality of monarchy?
Perhaps at this point we should digress a little and mention
Montesquieu, whose delightful Spirit of Laws we have lately been
reading. We should remind the reader, who would like to think he had
read him too, how Montesquieu distinguishes between the principles on
which the three sorts of government are founded: civic virtue being the
base of a republic, honor the ruling motive in the subjects of a
monarchy, and fear the dominant passion in the slaves of a despotism.
Then we should ask whether men were prepared to intrust the reins of
government to women when they had received this timely intimation that
women were more eager to arrive splendidly than to bring the car of
state in safety to the goal. How long would it be, we should poignantly
demand, before in passing from the love of civic virtue to the ambition
of honor, we should sink in the dread of power?

Our visitor was apparently not so deeply impressed by the treatment
of the subject here outlined as we had been intending and expecting he
should be. He asked, after a moment, Don't you think that would be
rather a heavy-handed way of dealing with the matter?

Oh, we returned, we have light methods of treating the weightiest
questions. There is the semi-ironical vein, for instance, which you
must have noticed a good deal in us, and perhaps it would be better
suited to the occasion.

Yes? our visitor suggested.

Yes, we repeated. In that vein we should question at the start
whether any such praise of monarchy had been spoken, and then we should
suppose it had, and begin playfully to consider what the honors and
distinctions were that women had enjoyed under monarchy. We should make
a merit at the start of throwing up the sponge for republics. We should
own they had never done the statesmanlike qualities of women justice.
We should glance, but always a little mockingly, at the position of
woman in the Greek republics, and contrast, greatly to the republican
disadvantage, her place in the democracy of Athens with that she held
in the monarchy of Sparta. We should touch upon the fact that the
Athenian women were not only not in politics, but were not even in
society, except a class which could be only fugitively mentioned, and
we should freely admit that the Spartan women were the heroic
inspiration of the men in all the virtues of patriotism at home as well
as in the field. We should recognize the sort of middle station women
held in the Roman republic, where they were not shut up in the almost
Oriental seclusion of Athenian wives, nor invited to a share in
competitive athletics like the Spartan daughters. We should note that
if a Spartan mother had the habit of bidding her son return with his
shield or on it, a Roman mother expressed a finer sense of her
importance in the state when she intimated that it was enough for her
to be the parent of the Gracchi. But we should not insist upon our
point, which, after all, would not prove that the decorative quality of
women in public life was recognized in Rome as it always has been in
monarchies, and we should recur to the fact that this was the point
which had been made against all republics. Coming down to the Italian
republics, we should have to own that Venice, with her ducal
figurehead, had practically a court at which women shone as they do in
monarchies; while in Florence, till the Medici established themselves
in sovereign rule, women played scarcely a greater part than in Athens.
It was only with the Medici that we began to hear of such distinguished
ladies as Bianca Cappello; and in the long, commonplace annals of the
Swiss commonwealth we should be able to recall no female name that lent
lustre to any epoch. We should contrast this poverty with the riches of
the French monarchy, adorned with the memories of Agnes Sorel, of Diane
de Poitiers, of Madame de Montespan, of Madame de Pompadour, following
one another in brilliant succession, and sharing not only the glory but
the authority of the line of princes whose affections they ruled. Of
course, we should have to use an ironical gravity in concealing their
real quality and the character of the courts where they flourished; and
in comparing the womanless obscurity of the English Commonwealth with
the feminine effulgence of the Restoration, we should seek a greater
effect in our true aim by concealing the name and nature of the ladies
who illustrated the court of Charles II.

And what would your true aim be? our visitor pressed, with an
unseemly eagerness which we chose to snub by ignoring it.

As for the position of women in despotisms, we continued, we
should confess that it seemed to be as ignobly subordinate as that of
women in republics. They were scarcely more conspicuous than the
Citizenesses who succeeded in the twilight of the One and Indivisible
the marquises and comtesses and duchesses of the Ancien Regime, unless
they happened, as they sometimes did, to be the head of the state.
Without going back to the semi-mythical Semiramis, we should glance at
the characters of Cleopatra and certain Byzantine usurpresses, and with
a look askance at the two empresses of Russia, should arrive at her
late imperial majesty of China. The poor, bad Isabella of Spain would
concern us no more than the great, good Victoria of England, for they
were the heads of monarchies and not of despotisms; but we should
subtly insinuate that the reigns of female sovereigns were nowhere
adorned by ladies of the distinction so common as hardly to be
distinction in the annals of kings and emperors. What famous beauty
embellished the court of Elizabeth or either Mary? Even Anne's Mrs.
Masham was not a shining personality, and her Sarah of Marlborough was
only a brilliant shrew.

At this point we should digress a little, but we should pursue our
inquiry in the same satirical tenor. We hope we are not of those
moralists who assume a merit in denouncing the international marriages
which have brought our women, some to think tolerantly and some to
think favorably of a monarchy as affording greater scope for their
social genius. But we should ask, with the mock-seriousness befitting
such a psychological study, how it was that, while American girls
married baronets and viscounts and earls and dukes, almost none, if
any, of their brothers married the sisters or daughters of such
noblemen. It could not be that they were not equally rich and therefore
equally acceptable, and could it be that they made it a matter of
conscience not to marry ladies of title? Were our men, then, more
patriotic than our women? Were men naturally more republican than
women?

This question would bring us to the pass where we should more or
less drop the mocking mask. We should picture a state of things in
which we had actually arrived at a monarchy of our own, with a real
sovereign and a nobility and a court, and the rest of the tradition.
With a sudden severity we should ask where, since they could not all be
of the highest rank, our women would consent to strike the procession
of precedence? How, with their inborn and inbred notions of the
deference due their sex, with that pride of womanhood which our
republican chivalry has cherished in them, they would like, when they
went to court, to stand, for hours perhaps, while a strong young man,
or a fat old man, or a robust man in the prime of life, remained seated
in the midst of them? Would it flatter their hopes of distinction to
find the worst scenes of trolley-car or subway transit repeated at the
highest social function in the land, with not even a hanging-strap to
support their weariness, their weakness, or, if we must say it, their
declining years? Would the glory of being part of a spectacle
testifying in our time to the meanness and rudeness of the past be a
compensation for the aching legs and breaking backs under the trailing
robes and the nodding plumes of a court dress?

That would be a telling stroke, our visitor said, but wouldn't it
be a stroke retold? It doesn't seem to me very new.

No matter, we said. The question is not what a thing is, but how
it is done. You asked how we should treat a given subject, and we have
answered.

And is that all you could make of it?

By no means. As subjects are never exhausted, so no subject is ever
exhausted. We could go on with this indefinitely. We could point out
that the trouble was, with us, not too much democracy, but too little;
that women's civic equality with men was perhaps the next step, and not
the social inequality among persons of both sexes. Without feeling that
it affected our position, we would acknowledge that there was now
greater justice for women in a monarchy like Great Britain than in a
republic like the United States; with shame we would acknowledge it;
but we would never admit that it was so because of the monarchism of
the first or the republicanism of the last. We should finally be very
earnest with this phase of our subject, and we should urge our fair
readers to realize that citizenship was a duty as well as a right. We
should ask them before accepting the suffrage to consider its
responsibilities and to study them in the self-sacrificing attitude of
their husbands and fathers, or the brothers of one another, toward the
state. We should make them observe that the actual citizen was not
immediately concerned with the pomps and glories of public life; that
parties and constituencies were not made up of one's
fellow-aristocrats, but were mostly composed of plebeians very jealous
of any show of distinction, and that, in spite of the displeasures of
political association with them, there was no present disposition in
American men to escape to monarchy from them. We cannot, we should
remind them, all be of good family; that takes time, or has taken it;
and without good family the chances of social eminence, or even
prominence, are small at courts. Distinction is more evenly distributed
in a democracy like ours; everybody has a chance at it. To be sure, it
is not the shining honor bestowed by kings, but when we remember how
often the royal hand needs washing we must feel that the honor from it
may have the shimmer of putrescence. This is, of course, the extreme
view of the case; and the condition of the royal hand is seldom
scrutinized by those who receive or those who witness the honor
bestowed. But the honor won from one's fellow-citizens is something
worth having, though it is not expressed in a ribbon or a title. Such
honor, it seems probable, will soon be the reward of civic virtue in
women as well as men, and we hope women will not misprize it. The great
end to be achieved for them by the suffrage is self-government, but
with this goes the government of others, and that is very pleasant. The
head of our state may be a woman, chosen at no far-distant election;
and though it now seems droll to think of a woman being president, it
will come in due time to seem no more so than for a woman to be a queen
or an empress. At any rate, we must habituate our minds to the idea; we
must realize it with the hope it implies that no woman will then care
socially to outshine her sister; at the most she will be emulous of her
in civic virtue, the peculiar grace and glory of republics. We
understand that this is already the case in New Zealand and Colorado
and Wyoming. It is too soon, perhaps, to look for the effect of
suffrage on the female character in Denmark; it may be mixed, because
there the case is complicated by the existence of a king, which may
contaminate that civic virtue by the honor which is the moving
principle in a monarchy. And now, we turned lightly to our visitor,
what is the topic you wish us to treat?

Oh, he said, rising, you have put it quite out of my head; I've
been so absorbed in what you were saying. But may I ask just where in
your treatment of the theme your irony ends?

The air of having just got home from Europe was very evident in the
friend who came to interview himself with us the other day. It was not,
of course, so distinguishing as it would have been in an age of less
transatlantic travel, but still, as we say, it was evident, and it lent
him a superiority which he could not wholly conceal. His superiority,
so involuntary, would, if he had wished to dissemble, have affirmed
itself in the English cut of his clothes and in the habit of his
top-hat, which was so newly from a London shop as not yet to have lost
the whiteness of its sweat-band. But his difference from ourselves
appeared most in a certain consciousness of novel impressions, which
presently escaped from him in the critical tone of his remarks.

Well, we said, with our accustomed subtlety, how do you find your
fellow-savages on returning to them after a three months' absence?

Don't ask me yet, he answered, laying his hat down on a pile of
rejected MSS., delicately, so as not to dim the lustre of its nap. I
am trying to get used to them, and I have no doubt I shall succeed in
time. But I would rather not be hurried in my opinions.

You find some relief from the summer's accumulation of sky-scrapers
amid the aching void of our manners? we suggested.

Oh, the fresh sky-scrapers are not so bad. You won't find the
English objecting to them half so much as some of our own fellows. But
you are all right about the aching void of manners. That is truly the
bottomless pit with us.

You think we get worse?

I don't say that, exactly. How could we?

It might be difficult.

I will tell you what, he said, after a moment's muse. There does
not seem to be so much an increase of bad manners, or no manners, as a
diffusion. The foreigners who come to us in hordes, but tolerably civil
hordes, soon catch the native unmannerliness, and are as rude as the
best of us, especially the younger generations. The older people,
Italians, Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Assyrians, or whatever nationalities
now compose those hordes, remain somewhat in the tradition of their
home civility; but their children, their grandchildren, pick up our
impoliteness with the first words of our language, or our slang, which
they make their adoptive mother-tongue long before they realize that it
is slang. When they do realize it, they still like it better than
language, and as no manners are easier than manners, they prefer the
impoliteness they find waiting them here. I have no doubt that their
morals improve; we have morals and to spare. They learn to carry
pistols instead of knives; they shoot instead of stabbing.

Have you been attacked with any particular type of revolver since
your return? we inquired, caustically.

I have been careful not to give offence.

Then why are you so severe upon your fellow-savages, especially the
minors of foreign extraction?

I was giving the instances which I supposed I was asked for; and I
am only saying that I have found our manners merely worse
quantitatively, or in the proportion of our increasing population. But
this prompt succession of the new Americans to the heritage of the old
Americans is truly grievous. They must so soon outnumber us, three to
one, ten to one, twenty, fifty, and they must multiply our incivilities
in geometrical ratio. At Boston, where I landed

Oh, you landed at Boston! we exclaimed, as if this accounted for
everything; but we were really only trying to gain time. If you had
landed at New York, do you think your sensibilities would have suffered
in the same degree? We added, inconsequently enough, We always
supposed that Boston was exemplary in the matters you are complaining
of.

And when you interrupted me, with a want of breeding which is no
doubt national rather than individual, I was going on to say that I
found much alleviation from a source whose abundant sweetness I had
forgotten. I moan the sort of caressing irony which has come to be the
most characteristic expression of our native kindliness. There can be
no doubt of our kindliness. Whatever we Americans of the old
race-suicidal stock are not, we are kind; and I think that our
expression of our most national mood has acquired a fineness, a
delicacy, with our people of all degrees, unknown to any other irony in
the world. Do you remember The House with the Green ShuttersI
can never think of the book without a pang of personal grief for the
too-early death of the authorhow the bitter, ironical temper of the
Scotch villagers is realized? Well, our ironical temper is just the
antithesis of that. It is all sweetness, but it is of the same origin
as that of those terrible villagers: it comes from that perfect, that
familiar understanding, that penetrating reciprocal intelligence, of
people who have lived intimately in one another's lives, as people in
small communities do. We are a small community thrown up large, as they
say of photographs; we are not so much a nation as a family; we each of
us know just what any other, or all others, of us intend to the finest
shade of meaning, by the lightest hint.

Ah! we breathed, quite as if we were a character in a novel which
had inspired the author with a new phrase. Now you are becoming
interesting. Should you mind giving a few instances?

Well, that is not so easy. But I may say that the friendly ironies
began for us as soon as we were out of the more single-minded keeping
of the ship's stewards, who had brought our hand-baggage ashore, and,
after extracting the last shilling of tip from us, had delivered us
over to the keeping of the customs officers. It began with the joking
tone of the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle
a great value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for
bothering us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a
piece of burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the
gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They
indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the
Government see that there was nothing dutiable underneath, where they
touched or lifted the contents with a mocking hand, and at times
carried the joke so far as to have some of the things removed. But they
helped put them back with a smile for the odd taste of the Government.
I do not suppose that an exasperating duty was ever so inexasperatingly
fulfilled.

Aren't you rather straining to make out a case? We have heard of
travellers who had a very different experience.

At New York, yes, where we are infected with the foreign singleness
more than at Boston. Perhaps a still livelier illustration of our
ironical temperament was given me once before when I brought some
things into Boston. There were some Swiss pewters, which the officers
joined me for a moment in trying to make out were more than two hundred
years old; but failing, jocosely levied thirty per cent. ad valorem on
them; and then in the same gay spirit taxed me twenty per cent. on a
medallion of myself done by an American sculptor, who had forgotten to
verify an invoice of it before the American consul at the port of
shipment.

It seems to us, we suggested, that this was a piece of dead
earnest.

The fact was earnest, our friend maintained, but the spirit in
which it was realized was that of a brotherly persuasion that I would
see the affair in its true light, as a joke that was on me. It was a
joke that cost me thirty dollars.

Still, we fail to see the irony of the transaction.

Possibly, our friend said, after a moment's muse, I am letting my
sense of another incident color the general event too widely. But
before I come to that I wish to allege some proofs of the national
irony which I received on two occasions when landing in New York. On
the first of these occasions the commissioner who came aboard the
steamer, to take the sworn declaration of the passengers that they were
not smugglers, recognized my name as that of a well-known financier who
had been abroad for a much-needed rest, and personally welcomed me home
in such terms that I felt sure of complete exemption from the duties
levied on others. When we landed I found that this good friend had
looked out for me to the extent of getting me the first inspector, and
he had guarded my integrity to the extent of committing me to a
statement in severalty of the things my family had bought abroad, so
that I had to pay twenty-eight dollars on my daughter's excess of the
hundred dollars allowed free, although my wife was bringing in only
seventy-five dollars' value, and I less than fifty.

You mean that you had meant to lump the imports and escape the tax
altogether? we asked.

Something like that.

And the officer's idea of caressing irony was to let you think you
could escape equally well by being perfectly candid?

Something like that.

And what was the other occasion?

Oh, it was when I had a letter to the customs officer, and he said
it would be all right, and then furnished me an inspector who opened
every piece of my baggage just as if I had been one of the wicked.

We could not help laughing, and our friend grinned appreciatively.
And what was that supreme instance of caressing irony which you
experienced in Boston? we pursued.

Ah, there is something I don't think you can question. But I
didn't experience it; I merely observed it. We were coming down the
stairs to take our hack at the foot of the pier, and an elderly lady
who was coming down with us found the footing a little insecure. The
man in charge bade her be careful, and then she turned upon him in
severe reproof, and scolded him well. She told him that he ought to
have those stairs looked after, for otherwise somebody would be killed
one of these days. 'Well, ma'am,' he said, 'I shouldn't like that. I
was in a railroad accident once. But I tell you what you do. The next
time you come over here, you just telephone me, and I'll have these
steps fixed. Or, I'll tell you: you just write me a letter and let me
know exactly how you want 'em fixed, and I'll see to it myself.'

That was charming, we had to own, and it was of an irony truly
caressing, as you say. Do you think it was exactly respectful?

It was affectionate, and I think the lady liked it as much as any
of us, or as the humorist himself.

Yes, it was just so her own son might have joked her, we assented.
But tell us, Croesus, we continued, in the form of Socratic dialogue,
did you find at Boston that multiple unmannerliness which you say is
apparent from the vast increase of adoptive citizens? We have been in
the habit of going to Boston when we wished to refresh our impression
that we had a native country; when we wished to find ourselves in the
midst of the good old American faces, which were sometimes rather
arraigning in their expression, but not too severe for the welfare of a
person imaginably demoralized by a New York sojourn.

Our friend allowed himself time for reflection. I don't think you
could do that now with any great hope of success. I should say that the
predominant face in Boston now was some type of Irish face. You know
that the civic affairs of Boston are now in the hands of the Irish. And
with reason, if the Irish are in the majority.

In New York it has long been the same without the reason, we
dreamily suggested.

In Boston, our friend went on, without regarding us, the
Catholics outvote the Protestants, and not because they vote oftener,
but because there are more of them.

And the heavens do not fall?

It is not a question of that; it is a question of whether the Irish
are as amiable and civil as the Americans, now they are on top.

We always supposed they were one of the most amiable and civil of
the human races. Surely you found them so?

I did at Queenstown, but at Boston I had not the courage to test
the fact. I would not have liked to try a joke with one of them as I
would at Queenstown, or as I would at Boston with an American. Their
faces did not arraign me, but they forbade me. It was very curious, and
I may have misread them.

Oh, probably not, we lightly mocked. They were taking it out of
you for ages of English oppression; they were making you stand for the
Black Cromwell.

Oh, very likely, our friend said, in acceptance of our irony,
because he liked irony so much. But, all the same, I thought it a
pity, as I think it a pity when I meet a surly Italian here, who at
home would be so sweet and gentle. It is somehow our own fault. We have
spoiled them by our rudeness; they think it is American to be as rude
as the Americans. They mistake our incivility for our liberty.

There is something in what you say, we agreed, if you will allow
us to be serious. They are here in our large, free air, without the
parasites that kept them in bounds in their own original habitat. We
must invent some sort of culture which shall be constructive and not
destructive, and will supply the eventual good without the provisional
evil.

Then we must go a great way back, and begin with our grandfathers,
with the ancestors who freed us from Great Britain, but did not free
themselves from the illusion that equality resides in incivility and
honesty in bluntness. That was something they transmitted to us intact,
so that we are now not only the best-hearted but the worst-mannered of
mankind. If our habitual carriage were not rubber-tired by irony, we
should be an intolerable offence, if not to the rest of the world, at
least to ourselves. By-the-way, since I came back I have been reading a
curious old book by James Fenimore Cooper, which I understand made a
great stir in its day. Do you know it?Home as Found?

We know it as one may know a book which one has not read. It pretty
nearly made an end of James Fenimore Cooper, we believe. His
fellow-countrymen fell on him, tooth and nail. We didn't take so kindly
to criticism in those days as we do now, when it merely tickles the fat
on our ribs, and we respond with the ironic laughter you profess to
like so much. What is the drift of the book besides the general
censure?

Oh, it is the plain, dull tale of an American family returning home
after a long sojourn in Europe so high-bred that you want to kill them,
and so superior to their home-keeping countrymen that, vulgarity for
vulgarity, you much prefer the vulgarity of the Americans who have not
been away. The author's unconsciousness of the vulgarity of his
exemplary people is not the only amusing thing in the book. They arrive
for a short stay in New York before they go to their country-seat
somewhere up the State, and the sketches of New York society as it was
in the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century are certainly
delightful: society was then so exactly like what it is now in spirit.
Of course, it was very provincial, but society is always and everywhere
provincial. One thing about it then was different from what it is now:
I mean the attitude of the stay-at-homes toward the been-abroads. They
revered them and deferred to them, and they called them Hajii, or
travellers, in a cant which must have been very common, since George
William Curtis used the same Oriental term for his Howadji in Syria
and his Nile Notes of a Howadji.

We must read it, we said, with the readiness of one who never
intends to read the book referred to. What you say of it is certainly
very suggestive. But how do you account for the decay of the reverence
and deference in which the Hajii were once held?

Well, they may have overworked their superiority.

Or? we prompted.

The stay-at-homes may have got onto the been-abroads in a point
where we all fail, unless we have guarded ourselves very scrupulously.

And that is?

There is something very vulgarizing for Americans in the European
atmosphere, so that we are apt to come back worse-mannered than we went
away, and vulgarer than the untravelled, in so far as it is impoliter
to criticise than to be criticised.

And is that why your tone has been one of universal praise for your
countrymen in the present interview?

Our friend reached for his hat, smoothed a ruffled edge of the
crown, and blew a speck of dust from it. One reasons to a conclusion,
he said, not from it.

Our friend came in with challenge in his eye, and though a month had
passed, we knew, as well as if it were only a day, that he had come to
require of us the meaning in that saying of ours that New York derived
her inspiration from the future, or would derive it, if she ever got
it.

Well, he said, have you cleared your mind yet sufficiently to
'pour the day' on mine? Or hadn't you any meaning in what you said?
I've sometimes suspected it.

The truth is that we had not had very much meaning of the sort that
you stand and deliver, though we were aware of a large, vague wisdom in
our words. But we perceived that our friend had no intention of helping
us out, and on the whole we thought it best to temporize.

In the first place, we said, we should like to know what
impression New York made on you when you arrived here, if there was any
room left on your soul-surface after the image of Boston had been
imprinted there.

No man is unwilling to expatiate concerning himself, even when he is
trying to corner a fellow-man. This principle of human nature perhaps
accounts for the frequent failure of thieves to catch thieves, in spite
of the proverb; the pursuit suggests somehow the pleasures of
autobiography, and while they are reminded of this and that the
suspects escape the detectives. Our friend gladly paused to reply:

I wish I could say! It was as unbeautiful as it could be, but it
was wonderful! Has anybody else ever said that there is no place like
it? On some accounts I am glad there isn't; one place of the kind is
enough; but what I mean is that I went about all the next day after
arriving from Boston, with Europe still in my brain, and tried for
something suggestive of some other metropolis, and failed. There was no
question of Boston, of course; that was clean out of it after my first
glimpse of Fifth Avenue in taxicabbing hotelward from the Grand Central
Station. But I tried with Berlin, and found it a drearier Boston; with
Paris, and found it a blonder and blither Boston; with London, and
found it sombrely irrelevant and incomparable. New York is like London
only in not being like any other place, and it is next to London in
magnitude. So far, so good; but the resemblance ends there, though New
York is oftener rolled in smoke, or mist, than we willingly allow to
Londoners. Both, however, have an admirable quality which is not
beauty. One might call the quality picturesque immensity in London, and
in New York one might call it

He compressed his lips, and shut his eyes to a fine line for the
greater convenience of mentally visioning.

What? we impatiently prompted.

I was going to say, sublimity. What do you think of sublimity?

We always defend New York against you. We accept sublimity. How?

I was thinking of the drive up or down Fifth Avenue, the newer
Fifth Avenue, which has risen in marble and Indiana limestone from the
brownstone and brick of a former age, the Augustan Fifth Avenue which
has replaced that old Lincolnian Fifth Avenue. You get the effect best
from the top of one of the imperial motor-omnibuses which have replaced
the consular two-horse stages; and I should say that there was more
sublimity to the block between Sixteenth Street and Sixtieth than in
the other measures of the city's extent.

[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET]

This is very gratifying to us as a fond New-Yorker; but why leave
out of the reach of sublimity the region of the sky-scrapers, and the
spacious, if specious, palatiality of the streets on the upper West
Side?

I don't, altogether, our friend replied. Especially I don't leave
out the upper West Side. That has moments of being even beautiful. But
there is a point beyond which sublimity cannot go; and that is about
the fifteenth story. When you get a group of those sky-scrapers, all
soaring beyond this point, you have, in an inverted phase, the
unimpressiveness which Taine noted as the real effect of a prospect
from the summit of a very lofty mountain. The other day I found myself
arrested before a shop-window by a large photograph labelled 'The Heart
of New York.' It was a map of that region of sky-scrapers which you
seem to think not justly beyond the scope of attributive sublimity. It
was a horror; it set my teeth on edge; it made me think of
scrap-ironheaps, heights, pinnacles of scrap-iron. Don't ask me why
scrap-iron! Go and look at that photograph and you will understand.
Below those monstrous cliffs the lower roofs were like broken
foot-hills; the streets were chasms, gulches, gashes. It looked as if
there had been a conflagration, and the houses had been burned into the
cellars; and the eye sought the nerve-racking tangle of pipe and wire
which remains among the ruins after a great fire. Perhaps this was what
made me think of scrap-ironheaps, heights, pinnacles of it. No, there
was no sublimity there. Some astronomers have latterly assigned bounds
to immensity, but the sky-scrapers go beyond these bounds; they are
primordial, abnormal.

You strain for a phrase, we said, as if you felt the essential
unreality of your censure. Aren't you aware that mediaeval Florence,
mediaeval Siena, must have looked, with their innumerable towers, like
our sky-scrapered New York? They must have looked quite like it.

And very ugly. It was only when those towers, which were devoted to
party warfare as ours are devoted to business warfare, were levelled,
that Florence became fair and Siena superb. I should not object to a
New York of demolished sky-scrapers. They would make fine ruins; I
would like to see them as ruins. In fact, now I think of it, 'The Heart
of New York' reminded me of the Roman Forum. I wonder I didn't think of
that before. But if you want sublimity, the distinguishing quality of
New York, as I feel it more and more, while I talk of it, you must take
that stretch of Fifth Avenue from a motor-bus top.

But that stretch of Fifth Avenue abounds in sky-scrapers! we
lamented the man's inconsistency.

Sky-scrapers in subordination, yes. There is one to every other
block. There is that supreme sky-scraper, the Flatiron. But just as the
Flatiron, since the newspapers have ceased to celebrate its pranks with
men's umbrellas, and the feathers and flounces and 'tempestuous
petticoats' of the women, has sunk back into a measurable
inconspicuity, so all the other tall buildings have somehow harmonized
themselves with the prospect and no longer form the barbarous
architectural chaos of lower New York. I don't object to their being
mainly business houses and hotels; I think that it is much more
respectable than being palaces or war-like eminences, Guelf or
Ghibelline; and as I ride up-town in my motor-bus, I thrill with their
grandeur and glow with their condescension. Yes, they condescend; and
although their tall white flanks climb in the distance, they seem to
sink on nearer approach, and amiably decline to disfigure the line of
progress, or to dwarf the adjacent edifices. Down-town, in the heart of
New York, poor old Trinity looks driven into the ground by the
surrounding heights and bulks; but along my sublime upper Fifth Avenue
there is spire after spire that does not unduly dwindle, but looks as
if tenderly, reverently, protected by the neighboring giants. They are
very good and kind giants, apparently. But the acme of the sublimity,
the quality in which I find my fancy insisting more and more, is in
those two stately hostelries, the Gog and Magog of that giant company,
which guard the approach to the Park like mighty pillars, the posts of
vast city gates folded back from them.

Come! we said. This is beginning to be something like.

In November, our friend said, taking breath for a fresh spurt of
praise, there were a good many sympathetic afternoons which lent
themselves to motor-bus progress up that magnificent avenue, and if you
mounted to your place on top, about three o'clock, you looked up or
down the long vista of blue air till it turned mirk at either
vanishing-point under a sky of measureless cloudlessness. That dimness,
almost smokiness at the closes of the prospect, was something
unspeakably rich. It made me think, quite out of relation or relevance,
of these nobly mystical lines of Keats:

'His soul shall know the sadness of her night,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.'

We closed our eyes in the attempt to grope after him. Explain, O
Howadji!

I would rather not, as you say when you can't, he replied. But I
will come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those
visionary distances there are features of the prospect either way in
which I differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of
the cabs, moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and
down the street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen where
they stand at the successive crossings to stay them, and floating with
the coming and going tides as he drops his inhibitory hand and speeds
them in the continuous current. That is, of course, something you get
in greater quantity, though not such intense quality, in a London
'block,' but there is something more fluent, more mercurially
impatient, in a New York street jam, which our nerves more vividly
partake. Don't ask me to explain! I would rather not! he said, and we
submitted.

He went on to what seemed an unjustifiable remove from the point.
Nothing has struck me so much, after a half-year's absence, in this
novel revelation of sublimity in New York, as the evident increase on
the street crowds. The city seems to have grown a whole new population,
and the means of traffic and transportation have been duplicated in
response to the demand of the multiplying freights and feet. Our
friend laughed in self-derision, as he went on. I remember when we
first began to have the electric trolleys

Trams, we believe you call them, we insinuated.

Not when I'm on this side, he retorted, and he resumed: I used to
be afraid to cross the avenues where they ran. At certain junctions I
particularly took my life in my hand, and my 'courage in both hands.'
Where Sixth Avenue flows into Fifty-ninth Street, and at Sixth Avenue
and Thirty-fourth Street, and at Dead Man's Curve (he has long been
resuscitated) on Fourteenth Street, I held my breath till I got over
alive, and I blessed Heaven for my safe passage at Forty-second and
Twenty-third streets, and at divers places on Third Avenue. Now I
regard these interlacing iron currents with no more anxiety than I
would so many purling brooks, with stepping-stones in them to keep my
feet from the wet: they are like gentle eddiessoft, clear, slow
tideswhere one may pause in the midst at will, compared with the
deadly expanses of Fifth Avenue, with their rush of all manner of
vehicles over the smooth asphalt surface. There I stand long at the
brink; I look for a policeman to guide and guard my steps; I crane my
neck forward from my coign of vantage and count the cabs, the taxicabs,
the carriages, the private automobiles, the motor-buses, the
express-wagons, and calculate my chances. Then I shrink back. If it is
a corner where there is no policeman to bank the tides up on either
hand and lead me over, I wait for some bold, big team to make the
transit of the avenue from the cross-street, and then in its lee I find
my way to the other side. As for the trolleys, I now mock myself of
them, as Thackeray's Frenchmen were said to say in their peculiar
English. (I wonder if they really did?) It is the taxicabs that now
turn my heart to water. It is astonishing how they have
multipliedthey have multiplied even beyond the ratio of our
self-reduplicating population. There are so many already that this
morning I read in my paper of a trolley-car striking a horse-cab! The
reporter had written quite unconsciously, just as he used to write
horseless carriage. Yes, the motor-cab is now the type, the norm, and
the horse-cab is thethethe

He hesitated for the antithesis, and we proposed Abnorm?

Say abnorm! It is hideous, but I don't know that it is
wrong. Where was I?

You had got quite away from the sublimity of New York, which upon
the whole you seemed to attribute to the tall buildings along Fifth
Avenue. We should like you to explain again why, if 'The Heart of New
York,' with its sky-scrapers, made you think of scrap-iron, the
Flatiron soothed your lacerated sensibilities?

[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS]

The Flatiron is an incident, an accent merely, in the mighty music
of the Avenue, a happy discord that makes for harmony. It is no longer
nefarious, or even mischievous, now the reporters have got done
attributing a malign meteorological influence to it. I wish I could say
as much for the white marble rocket presently soaring up from the east
side of Madison Square, and sinking the beautiful reproduction of the
Giralda tower in the Garden half-way into the ground. As I look at this
pale yellowish brown imitation of the Seville original, it has a pathos
which I might not make you feel. But I would rather not look away from
Fifth Avenue at all. It is astonishing how that street has assumed and
resumed all the larger and denser life of the other streets. Certain of
the avenues, like Third and Sixth, remain immutably and
characteristically noisy and ignoble; and Fifth Avenue has not reduced
them to insignificance as it has Broadway. That is now a provincial
High Street beside its lordlier compeer; but I remember when Broadway
stormed and swarmed with busy life. Why, I remember the party-colored
'buses which used to thunder up and down; and I can fancy some Rip Van
Winkle of the interior returning to the remembered terrors and
splendors of that mighty thoroughfare, and expecting to be killed at
every crossingI can fancy such a visitor looking round in wonder at
the difference and asking the last decaying survivor of the famous
Broadway Squad what they had done with Broadway from the Battery to
Madison Square. Beyond that, to be sure, there is a mighty flare of
electrics blazoning the virtues of the popular beers, whiskeys, and
actresses, which might well mislead my elderly revisitor with the
belief that Broadway was only taken in by day, and was set out again
after dark in its pristineI think pristine is the word; it used to
beglory. But even by night that special length of Broadway lacks the
sublimity of Fifth Avenue, as I see it or imagine it from my motor-bus
top. I knew Fifth Avenue in the Lincolnian period of brick and
brownstone, when it had a quiet, exclusive beauty, the beauty of the
unbroken sky-line and the regularity of facade which it has not yet got
back, and may never get. You will get some notion of it still in
Madison Avenue, say from Twenty-eighth to Forty-second streets, and
perhaps you will think it was dull as well as proud. It is proud now,
but it is certainly not dull. There is something of columnar majesty in
the lofty flanks of these tall shops and hotels as you approach them,
which makes you think of some capital decked for a national holiday.
But in Fifth Avenue it is always holiday

Enough of streets! we cried, impatiently. Now, what of men? What
of that heterogeneity for which New York is famous, or infamous? You
noticed the contrasting Celtic and Pelasgic tribes in Boston. What of
them here, with all the tribes of Israel, lost and found, and the
'sledded Polack,' the Czech, the Hun, the German, the Gaul, the Gothic
and Iberian Spaniard, and the swart stranger from our sister continent
to the southward, and the islands of the seven seas, who so sorely
outnumber us?

Our friend smiled thoughtfully. Why, that is very curious! Do you
know that in Fifth Avenue the American type seems to have got back its
old supremacy? It is as if no other would so well suit with that
sublimity! I have not heard that race-suicide has been pronounced by
the courts amenable to our wise State law against felo de se,
but in the modern Fifth Avenue it is as if our stirp had suddenly
reclaimed its old-time sovereignty. I don't say that there are not
other faces, other tongues than ours to be seen, heard, there; far from
it! But I do say it is a sense of the American face, the American
tongue, which prevails. Once more, after long exile in the streets of
our own metropolis, you find yourself in an American city. Your native
features, your native accents, have returned in such force from abroad,
or have thronged here in such multitude from the prospering Pittsburgs,
Cincinnatis, Chicagos, St. Louises, and San Franciscos of the West,
that you feel as much at home in Fifth Avenue as you would in
Piccadilly, or in the Champs Elysees, or on the Pincian Hill. Yes, it
is very curious.

Perhaps, we suggested, after a moment's reflection, it isn't
true.

One of my surprises on Getting Back, the more or less imaginary
interlocutor who had got back from Europe said in his latest visit to
the Easy Chair, is the cheapness of the means of living in New York.

At this the Easy Chair certainly sat up. Stay not a moment,
Howadji, we exclaimed, in removing our deep-seated prepossession that
New York is the most expensive place on the planet.

But instead of instantly complying our friend fell into a smiling
muse, from which he broke at last to say: I have long been touched by
the pathos of a fact which I believe is not yet generally known. Do you
know yourself, with the searching knowledge which is called feeling it
in your bones, that a good many Southerners and Southerly Westerners
make this town their summer resort? We intimated that want of
penetrating statistics which we perceived would gratify him, and he
went on. They put up at our hotels which in the 'anguish of the
solstice' they find invitingly vacant. As soon as they have registered
the clerk recognizes them as Colonel, or Major, or Judge, but gives
them the rooms which no amount of family or social prestige could
command in the season, and there they stay, waking each day from
unmosquitoed nights to iced-melon mornings, until a greater anguish is
telegraphed forward by the Associated Press. Then they turn their keys
in their doors, and flit to the neighboring Atlantic or the adjacent
Catskills, till the solstice recovers a little, and then they return to
their hotel and resume their life in the city, which they have almost
to themselves, with its parks and drives and roof-gardens and
vaudevilles, unelbowed by the three or four millions of natives whom we
leave behind us when we go to Europe, or Newport, or Bar Harbor, or the
Adirondacks. Sometimes they take furnished flats along the Park, and
settle into a greater permanency than their hotel sojourn implies. They
get the flats at about half the rent paid by the lessees who sublet
them, but I call it pathetic that they should count it joy to come
where we should think it misery to stay. Still, everything is
comparative, and I suppose they are as reasonably happy in New York as
I am in my London lodgings in the London season, where I sometimes
stifle in a heat not so pure and clear as that I have fled from.

Very well, we said, dryly, you have established the fact that the
Southerners come here for the summer and live in great luxury; but what
has that to do with the cheapness of living in New York, which you
began by boasting?

Ah, I was coming back to that, the Howadji said, with a glow of
inspiration. I have been imagining, in the relation which you do not
see, that New York can be made the inexpensive exile of its own
children as it has been made the summer home of those sympathetic
Southerners. If I can establish the fact of its potential cheapness, as
I think I can, I shall deprive them of some reasons for going abroad,
though I'm not sure they will thank me, when the reasons for Europe are
growing fewer and fewer. Culture can now be acquired almost as
advantageously here as there. Except for the 'monuments,' in which we
include all ancient and modern masterpieces in the several arts, we
have no excuse for going to Europe, and even in these masterpieces
Europe is coming to us so increasingly in every manner of reproduction
that we allege the monuments almost in vain. The very ruins of the past
are now so accurately copied in various sorts of portable plasticity
that we may know them here with nearly the same emotion as on their own
ground. The education of their daughters which once availed with
mothers willing to sacrifice themselves and their husbands to the
common good, no longer avails. The daughters know the far better time
they will have at home, and refuse to go, as far as daughters may, and
in our civilization this, you know, is very far. But it was always held
a prime reason and convincing argument that Dresden, Berlin, Paris,
Rome, and even London, were so much cheaper than New York that it was a
waste of money to stay at home.

Well, wasn't it? we impatiently demanded.

I will not say, for I needn't, as yet. There were always at the
same time philosophers who contended that if we lived in those capitals
as we lived at home, they would be dearer than New York. But what is
really relevant is the question whether New York isn't cheaper now.

We thought it had got past a question with you. We thought you
began by saying that New York is cheaper.

I can't believe I was so crude, the Howadji returned, with a fine
annoyance. That is the conclusion you have characteristically jumped
to without looking before you leap. I was going to approach the fact
much more delicately, and I don't know but what by your haste you have
shattered my ideal of the conditions. But I'll own that the great
stumbling-block to my belief that the means of living in New York are
cheaper than in the European capitals is that the house rents here are
so incomparably higher than they are there. But I must distinguish and
say that I mean flat-rents, for, oddly enough, flats are much dearer
than houses. You can get a very pretty little house, in a fair quarter,
with plenty of light and a good deal of sun, for two-thirds and
sometimes one-half what you must pay for a flat with the same number of
rooms, mostly dark or dim, and almost never sunny. Of course, a house
is more expensive and more difficult to 'run,' but even with the cost
of the greater service and of the furnace heat the rent does not reach
that of a far less wholesome and commodious flat. There is one thing to
be said in favor of a flat, however, and that is the women are in favor
of it. The feminine instinct is averse to stairs; the sex likes to be
safely housed against burglars, and when it must be left alone, it
desires the security of neighbors, however strange the neighbors may
be; it likes the authority of a janitor, the society of an
elevator-boy. It hates a lower door, an area, an ash-barrel, and a back
yard. But if it were willing to confront all these inconveniences, it
is intimately, it is osseously, convinced that a house is not cheaper
than a flat. As a matter of fact, neither a house nor a flat is cheap
enough in New York to bear me out in my theory that New York is no more
expensive than those Old World cities. To aid efficiently in my support
I must invoke the prices of provisions, which I find, by inquiry at
several markets on the better avenues, have reverted to the genial
level of the earlier nineteen-hundreds, before the cattle combined with
the trusts to send them up. I won't prosily rehearse the quotations of
beef, mutton, pork, poultry, and fish; they can be had at any dealer's
on demand; and they will be found less, on the whole, than in London,
less than in Paris, less even than in Rome. They are greater no doubt
than the prices in our large Western cities, but they are twenty per
cent. less than the prices in Boston, and in the New England towns
which hang upon Boston's favor for their marketing. I do not know how
or why it is that while we wicked New-Yorkers pay twenty-five cents for
our beefsteak, these righteous Bostonians should have to pay thirty,
for the same cut and quality. Here I give twenty-eight a pound for my
Java coffee; in the summer I live near an otherwise delightful New
Hampshire town where I must give thirty-eight. It is strange that the
siftings of three kingdoms, as the Rev. Mr. Higginson called his
fellow-Puritans, should have come in their great-grandchildren to a
harder fate in this than the bran and shorts and middlings of such
harvestings as the fields of Ireland and Italy, of Holland and Hungary,
of Poland and Transylvania and Muscovy afford. Perhaps it is because
those siftings have run to such a low percentage of the whole New
England population that they must suffer, along with the refuse of the
millsthe Mills of the Godsabounding in our city and its
dependencies.

I don't know how much our housekeepers note the fall of the prices
in their monthly bills, but in browsing about for my meals, as I rather
like to do, I distinctly see it in the restaurant rates. I don't mean
the restaurants to which the rich or reckless resort, but those
modester places which consult the means of the careful middle class to
which I belong. As you know, I live ostensibly at the Hotel Universe. I
have a room there, and that is my address

We know, we derisively murmured. So few of our visitors can
afford it.

I can't afford it myself, our friend said. But I save a little by
breakfasting there, and lunching and dining elsewhere. Or, I did till
the eggs got so bad that I had to go out for my breakfast, too. Now I
get perfect eggs, of the day before, for half the price that the
extortionate hens laying for the Universe exact for their last week's
product. At a very good Broadway hotel, which simple strangers from
Europe think first class, I get a 'combination' breakfast of fresh
eggs, fresh butter, and fresh rolls, with a pot of blameless Souchong
or Ceylon tea, for thirty cents; if I plunge to the extent of a baked
apple, I pay thirty-five. Do you remember what you last paid in Paris
or Rome for coffee, rolls, and butter?

A franc fifty, we remembered.

And in London for the same with eggs you paid one and six, didn't
you?

Very likely, we assented.

Well, then, you begin to see. There are several good restaurants
quite near that good hotel where I get the same combination breakfast
for the same price; and if I go to one of those shining halls which you
find in a score of places, up and down Broadway and the side streets, I
get it for twenty-five cents. But though those shining halls glare at
you with roofs and walls of stainless tile and glass, and tables of
polished marble, their bill of fare is so inflexibly adjusted to the
general demand that I cannot get Souchong or Ceylon tea for any money;
I can only get Oolong; otherwise I must take a cup of their excellent
coffee. If I wander from my wonted breakfast, I can get almost anything
in the old American range of dishes for five or ten cents a portion,
and the quality and quantity are both all I can ask. As I have learned
upon inquiry, the great basal virtues of these places are good eggs and
good butter: I like to cut from the thick slice of butter under the
perfect cube of ice, better than to have my butter pawed into balls or
cut into shavings, as they serve your butter in Europe. But I prefer
having a small table to myself, with my hat and overcoat vis-a-vis on
the chair opposite, as I have it at that good hotel. In those shining
halls I am elbowed by three others at my polished marble table; but if
there were more room I should never object to the company. It is the
good, kind, cleanly, comely American average, which is the best company
in the world, with a more than occasional fine head, and faces
delicately sculptured by thought and study. I address myself fearlessly
to the old and young of my own sex, without ever a snub such as I might
get from the self-respectful maids or matrons who resort to the shining
halls, severally or collectively, if I ventured upon the same freedom
with them. I must say that my commensals lunch or dine as wisely as I
do for the most part, but sometimes I have had to make my tacit
criticisms; and I am glad that I forbore one night with a friendly
young man at my elbow, who had just got his order of butter-cakes

Butter-cakes? we queried.

That is what they call a rich, round, tumid product of the griddle,
which they serve very hot, and open to close again upon a large lump of
butter. For two of those cakes and his coffee my unknown friend paid
fifteen cents, and made a supper, after which I should not have needed
to break my fast the next morning. But he fearlessly consumed it, and
while he ate he confided that he was of a minor clerical employ in one
of the great hotels near by, and when I praised our shining hall and
its guests he laughed and said he came regularly, and he always saw
people there who were registered at his hotel: they found it good and
they found it cheap. I suppose you know that New York abounds in tables
d'hote of a cheapness unapproached in the European capitals?

We said we had heard so; at the same time we tried to look as if we
always dined somewhere in society, but Heaven knows whether we
succeeded.

The combination breakfast is a form of table d'hote; and at a very
attractive restaurant in a good place I have seen such a
breakfastfruit, cereal, eggs, rolls, and coffeeoffered for fifteen
cents. I have never tried it, not because I had not the courage, but
because I thought thirty cents cheap enough; those who do not I should
still hold worthy of esteem if they ate the fifteen-cent breakfast. I
have also seen placarded a 'business men's lunch' for fifteen cents,
which also I have not tried; I am not a business man. I make bold to
say, however, that I often go for my lunch or my dinner to a certain
Italian place on a good avenue, which I will not locate more definitely
lest you should think me a partner of the enterprise, for fifty and
sixty cents, 'vino compreso.' The material is excellent, and the
treatment is artistic; the company of a simple and self-respectful
domesticity which I think it an honor to be part of: fathers and
mothers of families, aunts, cousins, uncles, grandparents. I do not
deny a Merry Widow hat here and there, but the face under it, though
often fair and young, is not a Merry Widow face. Those people all look
as kind and harmless as the circle which I used to frequent farther
down-town at a fifty-cent French table d'hote, but with a
bouillabaisse added which I should not, but for my actual
experiences, have expected to buy for any money. But there are plenty
of Italian and French tables d'hote for the same price all over town.
If you venture outside of the Latin race, you pay dearer and you fare
worse, unless you go to those shining halls which I have been praising.
If you go to a German place, you get grosser dishes and uncouth manners
for more money; I do not know why that amiable race should be so dear
and rude in its feeding-places, but that is my experience.

You wander, you wander! we exclaimed. Why should we care for your
impressions of German cooking and waiting, unless they go to prove or
disprove that living in New York is cheaper than in the European
capitals?

Perhaps I was going to say that even those Germans are not so dear
as they are in the fatherland, though rude. They do not tend much if at
all to tables d'hote, but the Italians and the French who do, serve you
a better meal for a lower price than you would get in Paris, or Rome,
or Naples. There the prevalent ideal is five francs, with neither wine
nor coffee included. I'll allow that the cheap table d'hote is mainly
the affair of single men and women, and does not merit the
consideration I've given it. If it helps a young couple to do with one
maid, or with none, instead of two, it makes for cheapness of living.
Service is costly and it is greedy, and except in large households its
diet is the same as the family's, so that anything which reduces it is
a great saving. But the table d'hote which is cheap for one or two is
not cheap for more, and it is not available if there are children.
Housing and raw-provisioning and serving are the main questions, and in
Europe the first and last are apparently much less expensive. Marketing
is undoubtedly cheaper with us, and if you count in what you get with
the newness, the wholesomeness, and handiness of an American flat, the
rent is not so much greater than that of a European flat, with its
elementary bareness. You could not, here, unless you descended from the
apartment to the tenement, hire any quarter where you would not be
supplied with hot and cold water, with steam heating, with a bath-room,
and all the rest of it.

But, we said, you are showing that we are more comfortably housed
than the Europeans, when you should be treating the fact of relative
cheapness.

I was coming to that even in the matter of housing

It is too late to come to it in this paper. You have now talked
three thousand words, and that is the limit. You must be silent for at
least another month.

But if I have something important to say at this juncture? If I may
not care to recur to the subject a month hence? If I may have returned
to Europe by that time?

Then you can the better verify your statistics. But the rule in
this place is inflexible. Three thousand words, neither more nor less.
The wisdom of Solomon would be blue-pencilled if it ran to more.

The Howadji, or the Hajii, us people called his sort in the days of
Home as Found, was prompt to the hour when his month's absence was
up, and he began without a moment's delay: But of course the lion in
the way of my thesis that New York is comparatively cheap is the rent,
the rent of flats or houses in the parts of the town where people of
gentle tastes and feelings are willing to live. Provisions are cheap;
furnishings of all kinds are cheap; service, especially when you mainly
or wholly dispense with it, is cheap, for one maid here will do the
work of two abroad, and if the mistress of the house does her own work
she can make the modern appliances her handmaids at no cost whatever.
It is ridiculous, in fact, leaving all those beautiful and ingenious
helps in housework to the hirelings who work only twice as hard with
them for more wages than the hirelings of countries where they don't
exist.

Don't be so breathless, we interposed. You will only be allowed
to talk three thousand words, whether you talk fast or slow, and you
might as well take your ease.

That is true, the Howadji reflected. But I am full of my subject,
and I have the feeling that I am getting more out, even if I can't get
more in, by talking fast. The rent question itself, he hurried on,
has been satisfactorily solved of late in the new invention of
co-operative housing which you may have heard of.

We owned that we had, with the light indifference of one whom
matters of more money or less did not concern, and our friend went on.

The plan was invented, you know, by a group of artists who imagined
putting up a large composite dwelling in a street where the cost of
land was not absolutely throat-cutting, and finishing it with tasteful
plainness in painted pine and the like, but equipping it with every
modern convenience in the interest of easier housekeeping. The
characteristic and imperative fact of each apartment was a vast and
lofty studio whose height was elsewhere divided into two floors, and so
gave abundant living-rooms in little space. The proprietorial group may
have been ten, say, but the number of apartments was twice as many, and
the basic hope was to let the ten other apartments for rents which
would carry the expense of the whole, and house the owners at little or
no cost. The curious fact is that this apparently too simple-hearted
plan worked. The Philistines, as the outsiders may be called, liked
being near the self-chosen people; they liked the large life-giving
studio which imparted light and air to the two floors of its rearward
division, and they eagerly paid the sustaining rents. The fortunate
experience of one aesthetic group moved others to like enterprises; and
now there are eight or ten of these co-operative studio
apartment-houses in different parts of the town.

With the same fortunate experience for the owners? we queried,
with suppressed sarcasm.

Not exactly, our friend assented to our intention. The successive
groups have constantly sought more central, more desirable, more
fashionable situations. They have built not better than they knew, for
that could not be, but costlier, and they have finished in hard woods,
with marble halls and marbleized hall-boys, and the first expense has
been much greater; but actual disaster has not yet followed; perhaps it
is too soon; we must not be impatient; but what has already happened is
what happens with other beautiful things that the aesthetic invent. It
has happened notoriously with all the most lovable and livable summer
places which the artists and authors find out and settle themselves
cheaply and tastefully in. The Philistines, a people wholly without
invention, a cuckoo tribe incapable of self-nesting, stumble upon those
joyous homes by chance, or by mistaken invitation. They submit meekly
enough at first to be sub-neighbors ruled in all things by the genius
of the place; but once in, they begin to lay their golden eggs in some
humble cottage, and then they hatch out broods of palatial villas
equipped with men and maid servants, horses, carriages, motors, yachts;
and if the original settlers remain it is in a helpless inferiority, a
broken spirit, and an overridden ideal. This tragical history is the
same at Magnolia, and at York Harbor, and at Dublin, and at Bar Harbor;
even at Newport itself; the co-operative housing of New York is making
a like history. It is true that the Philistines do not come in and
dispossess the autochthonic groups; these will not sell to them; but
they have imagined doing on a sophisticated and expensive scale what
the aesthetics have done simply and cheaply. They are buying the
pleasanter sites, and are building co-operatively; though they have
already eliminated the studio and the central principle, and they build
for the sole occupancy of the owners. But the cost of their housing
then is such that it puts them out of the range of our inquiry as their
riches has already put them beyond the range of our sympathy. It still
remains for any impecunious group to buy the cheaper lots, and build
simpler houses on the old studio principle, with rents enough to pay
the cost of operation, and leave the owners merely the interest and
taxes, with the eventual payment of these also by the tenants. Some of
the studio apartments are equipped with restaurants, and the dwellers
need only do such light housekeeping as ladies may attempt without
disgrace, or too much fatigue.

Or distraction from their duties to society, we suggested.

It depends upon what you mean by society; it's a very general and
inexact term. If you mean formal dinners, dances, parties, receptions,
and all that, the lightest housekeeping would distract from the duties
to it; but if you mean congenial friends willing to come in for tea in
the afternoon, or to a simple lunch, or not impossibly a dinner, light
housekeeping is not incompatible with a conscientious recognition of
society's claims. I think of two ladies, sisters, one younger and one
older than the other, who keep house not lightly, but in its full
weight of all the meals, for their father and brother, and yet are most
gracefully and most acceptably in the sort of society which Jane Austen
says is, if not good, the best: the society of gifted, cultivated,
travelled, experienced, high-principled people, capable of respecting
themselves and respecting their qualities wherever they find them in
others. These ladies do not pretend to 'entertain,' but their table is
such that they are never afraid to ask a friend to it. In a moment, if
there is not enough or not good enough, one of them conjures something
attractive out of the kitchen, and you sit down to a banquet. The
sisters are both of that gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence
in our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of the general
health. They employ aesthetically the beautiful alleviations with which
science has rescued domestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse;
it is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, so charming,
that you can hardly forbear taking hold yourself.

But you do forbear, we interposed; and do you imagine that their
example is going to prevail with the great average of impecunious
American housewives, or sisters, or daughters?

No, they will continue to 'keep a girl' whom they will enslave to
the performance of duties which they would be so much better for doing
themselves, both in body and mind, for that doing would develop in them
the hospitable soul of those two dear ladies. They will be in terror of
the casual guest, knowing well that they cannot set before him things
fit to eat. They have no genius for housekeeping, which is one with
home-making: they do not love it, and those ladies do love it in every
detail, so that their simple flat shines throughout with a lustre which
pervades the kitchen and the parlor and the chamber alike. It is the
one-girl household, or the two-girl, which makes living costly because
it makes living wasteful; it is not the luxurious establishments of the
rich which are to blame for our banishment to the mythical cheapness of
Europe.

We were not convinced by the eloquence which had overheated our
friend, and we objected: But those ladies you speak of give their
whole lives to housekeeping, and ought cheapness to be achieved at such
an expense?

In the first place, they don't; and, if they do, what do the
one-girl or the two-girl housekeepers give their lives to? or, for the
matter of that, the ten or twenty girl housekeepers? The ladies of whom
I speak have always read the latest book worth reading; they have seen
the picture which people worth while are talking of; they know through
that best society which likes a cup of their tea all the aesthetic
gossip of the day; they are part of the intellectual movement, that
part which neither the arts nor the letters can afford to ignore; they
help to make up the polite public whose opinions are the court of final
appeal.

They strike us, we said, stubbornly, as rather romantic.

Ah, there you are! Well, they are romanticromantic like a
gentle poem, like an idyllic tale; but I deny that they are
romanticistic. Their whole lives deal with realities, the
every-other-day as well as the every-day realities. But the lives of
those others who make all life costly by refusing their share of its
work dwell in a web of threadbare fictions which never had any color of
truth in this country. They are trying to imitate poor imitations, to
copy those vulgar copies of the European ideal which form the
society-page's contribution to the history of our contemporary
civilization.

We were so far moved as to say, We think we see what you mean, and
our friend went on.

Speaking of civilization, do you know what a genial change the
tea-room is working in our morals and manners? There are many
interesting phases of its progress among us, and not the least
interesting of these is its being so largely the enterprise of ladies
who must not only save money, but must earn money, in order to live,
not cheaply, but at all. Their fearlessness in going to work has often
the charm of a patrician past, for many of them are Southern women who
have come to New York to repair their broken fortunes. The tea-room has
offered itself as a graceful means to this end, and they have accepted
its conditions, which are mainly the more delicate kinds of cookery,
with those personal and racial touches in which Southern women are so
expert. But there are tea-rooms managed by Western women, if I may
judge from the accents involuntarily overheard in their talk at the
telephone. The tea of the tea-room means lunch, too, and in some places
breakfast and dinner, or rather supper, on much the plan of the several
Women's Exchanges; but these are mostly of New England inspiration and
operation, and their cooking has a Northern quality. They, as well as
the tea-rooms, leave something to be desired in cheapness, though they
might be dearer; in some you get tea for fifteen cents, in others a no
better brew for twenty-five. But they are all charmingly peaceful, and
when at the noon hour they overflow with conversation, still there is a
prevailing sense of quiet, finely qualified by the feminine invention
and influence. Mere men are allowed to frequent these places, not only
under the protection of women, but also quite unchaperoned, and when
one sees them gently sipping their Souchong or Oolong, and respectfully
munching their toasted muffins or their chicken-pie, one remembers with
tender gratitude how recently they would have stood crooking their
elbows at deleterious bars, and visiting the bowls of cheese and
shredded fish and crackers to which their drink freed them, while it
enslaved them to the witchery of those lurid ladies contributed by art
to the evil attractions of such places: you see nowhere else ladies
depicted with so little on, except in the Paris salon. The New York
tea-rooms are not yet nearly so frequent as in London, but I think they
are on the average cosier, and on the whole I cannot say that they are
dearer. They really cheapen the midday meal to many who would otherwise
make it at hotels and restaurants, and, so far as they contribute to
the spread of the afternoon-tea habit, they actually lessen the cost of
living: many guests can now be fobbed off with tea who must once have
been asked to lunch.

But, we suggested, isn't that cheapness at the cost of
shabbiness, which no one can really afford?

No, I don't think so. Whatever lightens hospitality of its
cumbrousness makes for civilization, which is really more compatible
with a refined frugality than with an unbridled luxury. If every
a-la-carte restaurant, in the hotels and out of them, could be replaced
by tea-rooms, and for the elaborate lunches and dinners of private life
the informality and simplicity of the afternoon tea were substituted,
we should all be healthier, wealthier, and wiser; and I should not be
obliged to protract this contention for the superior cheapness of New
York.

But, wait! we said. There is something just occurs to us. If you
proved New York the cheapest great city in the world, wouldn't it tend
to increase our population even beyond the present figure, which you
once found so deplorable?

No, I imagine not. Or, rather, it would add to our population only
those who desire to save instead of those who desire to waste. We
should increase through the new-comers in virtuous economy, and not as
now in spendthrift vainglory. In the end the effect would be the same
for civilization as if we shrank to the size of Boston.

You will have to explain a little, Howadji, we said, if you
expect us to understand your very interesting position.

Why, you know, he answered, with easy superiority, that now our
great influx is of opulent strangers who have made a good deal of
money, and of destitute strangers willing to help them live on it. The
last we needn't take account of; they are common to all cities in all
ages; but the first are as new as any phenomenon can be in a world of
such tiresome tautologies as ours. They come up from our industrial
provinces, eager to squander their wealth in the commercial metropolis;
they throw down their purses as the heroes of old threw down their
gantlets for a gage of battle, and they challenge the local champions
of extortion to take them up. It is said that they do not want a
seasonable or a beautiful thing; they want a costly thing. If, for
instance, they are offered a house or an apartment at a rental of ten
or fifteen thousand, they will not have it; they require a rental of
fifteen or twenty thousand, so that it may be known, 'back home,' that
they are spending that much for rent in New York, and the provincial
imagination taxed to proportion the cost of their living otherwise to
such a sum. You may say that it is rather splendid, but you cannot deny
that it is also stupid.

Stupid, no; but barbaric, yes, we formulated the case. It is
splendid, as barbaric pearls and gold are splendid.

But you must allow that nothing could be more mischievous. When
next we go with our modest incomes against these landlords, they
suppose that we too want rentals of fifteen thousand, whereas we would
easily be satisfied with one of fifteen hundred or a thousand. The poor
fellows' fancy is crazed by those prodigals, and we must all suffer for
their madness. The extravagance of the new-comers does not affect the
price of provisions so much, or of clothes; the whole population
demands food and raiment within the general means, however much it must
exceed its means in the cost of shelter. The spendthrifts cannot set
the pace for such expenditures, no matter how much they lavish on their
backs and

Forbear! we cried. Turning from the danger we have saved you
from, you will say, we suppose, that New York would be the cheapest of
the great cities if it were not for the cost of shelter.

Something like that, he assented.

But as we understand, that difficulty is to be solved by
co-operative, or composite, housing?

Something like that, he said again, but there was a note of
misgiving in his voice.

Later in the summer, or earlier in the fall, than when we saw him
newly returned from Europe, that friend whom the veteran reader will
recall as having so brashly offered his impressions of the national
complexion and temperament looked in again on the Easy Chair.

Well, we said, do you wish to qualify, to hedge, to retract?
People usually do after they have been at home as long as you.

But I do not, he said. He took his former seat, but now laid on
the heap of rejected MSS., not the silken cylinder he had so daintily
poised there before, but a gray fedora that fell carelessly over in
lazy curves and hollows. I wish to modify by adding the effect of
further observation and adjusting it to my first conclusions. Since I
saw you I have been back to Boston; in fact, I have just come from
there.

We murmured some banality about not knowing a place where one could
better come from than Boston. But he brushed it by without notice.

To begin with, I wish to add that I was quite wrong in finding the
typical Boston face now prevalently Celtic.

You call that adding? we satirized.

He ignored the poor sneer.

My earlier observation was correct enough, but it was a result of
that custom which peoples the hills, the shores, and the sister
continent in summer with the New-Englanders of the past, and leaves
their capital to those New-Englanders of the future dominantly
represented by the Irish. At the time of my second visit the exiles had
returned, and there were the faces again that, instead of simply
forbidding me, arraigned me and held me guilty till I had proved myself
innocent.

Do you think, we suggested, that you would find this sort of
indictment in them if you had a better conscience?

Perhaps not. And I must own I did not find them so accusing when I
could study them in their contemplation of some more important subject
than myself. One such occasion for philosophizing them distinctly
offered itself to my chance witness when an event of the last
seriousness had called some hundreds of them together. One sees strong
faces elsewhere; I have seen them assembled especially in England; but
I have never seen such faces as those Boston faces, so intense, so full
of a manly dignity, a subdued yet potent personality, a consciousness
as far as could be from self-consciousness. I found something finely
visionary in it all, as if I were looking on a piece of multiple
portraiture such as you see in those Dutch paintings of companies at
Amsterdam, for instance. It expressed purity of race, continuity of
tradition, fidelity to ideals such as no other group of faces would now
express. You might have had the like at Rome, at Athens, at Florence,
at Amsterdam, in their prime, possibly in the England of the resurgent
parliament, though there it would have been mixed with a fanaticism
absent in Boston. You felt that these men no doubt had their
limitations, but their limitations were lateral, not vertical.

Then why, we asked, not very relevantly, don't you go and live in
Boston?

It wouldn't make me such a Bostonian if I did; I should want a
half-dozen generations behind me for that. Besides, I feel my
shortcomings less in New York.

You are difficult. Why not fling yourself into the tide of joy
here, instead of shivering on the brink in the blast of that east wind
which you do not even find regenerative? Why not forget our
inferiority, since you cannot forgive it? Or do you think that by being
continually reminded of it we can become as those Bostonians are? Can
we reduce ourselves, by repenting, from four millions to less than one,
and by narrowing our phylacteries achieve the unlimited Bostonian
verticality, and go as deep and as high?

No, our friend said. Good as they are, we can only be better by
being different. We have our own message to the future, which we must
deliver as soon as we understand it.

Is it in Esperanto?

It is at least polyglot. But you are taking me too seriously. I
wished merely to qualify my midsummer impressions of a prevailing
Celtic Boston by my autumnal impressions of a persisting Puritanic
Boston. But it is wonderful how that strongly persistent past still
characterizes the present in every development. Even those Irish faces
which I wouldn't have ventured a joke with were no doubt sobered by it;
and when the Italians shall come forward to replace them it will be
with no laughing Pulcinello masks, but visages as severe as those that
first challenged the wilderness of Massachusetts Bay, and made the
Three Hills tremble to their foundations.

It seems to us that you are yielding to rhetoric a little, aren't
you? we suggested.

Perhaps I am. But you see what I mean. And I should like to explain
further that I believe the Celtic present and the Pelasgic future will
rule Boston in their turn as the Puritanic past learned so admirably to
rule it: by the mild might of irony, by the beneficent power which, in
the man who sees the joke of himself enables him to enter brotherly
into the great human joke, and be friends with every good and kind
thing.

Could you be a little more explicit?

I would rather not for the moment. But I should like to make you
observe that the Boston to be has more to hope and less to fear from
the newer Americans than this metropolis where these are so much more
heterogeneous. Here salvation must be of the Jews among the swarming
natives of the East Side; but in Boston there is no reason why the
artistic instincts of the Celtic and Pelasgic successors of the
Puritans should not unite in that effect of beauty which is an effect
of truth, and keep Boston the first of our cities in good looks as well
as good works. With us here in New York a civic job has the chance of
turning out a city joy, but it is a fighting chance. In Boston there is
little doubt of such a job turning out a joy. The municipality of
Boston has had almost the felicity of Goldsmithit has touched nothing
which it has not adorned. Wherever its hand has been laid upon Nature,
Nature has purred in responsive beauty. They used to talk about the
made land in Boston, but half Boston is the work of man, and it shows
what the universe might have been if the Bostonians had been taken into
the confidence of the Creator at the beginning. The Back Bay was only
the suggestion of what has since been done; and I never go to Boston
without some new cause for wonder. There is no other such charming
union of pleasaunce and residence as the Fenways; the system of parks
is a garden of delight; and now the State has taken up the work, no
doubt at the city's suggestion, and, turning from the land to the
water, has laid a restraining touch on the tides of the sea, which,
ever since the moon entered on their management, have flowed and ebbed
through the channel of the Charles. The State has dammed the river; the
brine of the ocean no longer enters it, but it feeds itself full of
sweet water from the springs in the deep bosom of the country. The
Beacon Street houses back upon a steadfast expanse as fresh as the
constant floods of the Great Lakes.

[Illustration: CHARLES EMBANKMENT, BELOW HARVARD BRIDGE]

And we dare say that it looks as large as Lake Superior to Boston
eyes. What do they call their dam? The Charlesea?

You may be sure they will call it something tasteful and fit, our
friend responded, in rejection of our feeble mockery. Charlesea would
not be bad. But what I wish to make you observe is that all which has
yet been done for beauty in Boston has been done from the unexhausted
instinct of it in the cold heart of Puritanism, where it 'burns frore
and does the effect of fire.' As yet the Celtic and Pelasgic agencies
have had no part in advancing the city. The first have been content
with voting themselves into office, and the last with owning their
masters out-of-doors; for the Irish are the lords, and the Italians are
the landlords. But when these two gifted races, with their divinely
implanted sense of art, shall join forces with the deeply conscienced
taste of the Puritans, what mayn't we expect Boston to be?

And what mayn't we expect New York to be on the same terms, or,
say, when the Celtic and Pelasgic and Hebraic and Slavic elements join
with the old Batavians, in whom the love of the artistic is by right
also native? Come! Why shouldn't we have a larger Boston here?

Because we are too large, our friend retorted, undauntedly.
When graft subtly crept among the nobler motives which created the
park system of Boston the city could turn for help to the State and get
it; but could our city get help from our State? Our city is too big to
profit by that help; our State too small to render it. The commonwealth
of Massachusetts is creating a new Garden of Eden on the banks of the
Charlesea; but what is the State of New York doing to emparadise the
shores of the Hudson?

All the better for us, perhaps, we stubbornly, but not very
sincerely, contended, if we have to do our good works ourselves.

Yes, if we do them. But shall they remain undone if we don't do
them? The city of New York is so great that it swings the State of New
York. The virtues that are in each do not complement one another, as
the virtues of Boston and Massachusetts do. Where shall you find, in
our house or in our grounds, the city and the State joining to an
effect of beauty? When you come to New York, what you see of grandeur
is the work of commercialism; what you see of grandeur in Boston is the
work of civic patriotism. We hire the arts to build and decorate the
homes of business; the Bostonians inspire them to devote beauty and
dignity to the public pleasure and use. No, our friend concluded with
irritating triumph, we are too vast, too many, for the finest work of
the civic spirit. Athens could be beautifulFlorence, Venice, Genoa
werebut Rome, which hired or enslaved genius to create beautiful
palaces, temples, columns, statues, could only be immense. She could
only huddle the lines of Greek loveliness into a hideous agglomeration,
and lose their effect as utterly as if one should multiply Greek noses
and Greek chins, Greek lips and Greek eyes, Greek brows and Greek heads
of violet hair, in one monstrous visage. No, he exulted, in this
mortifying image of our future ugliness, when a city passes a certain
limit of space and population, she adorns herself in vain. London, the
most lovable of the mighty mothers of men, has not the charm of Paris,
which, if one cannot quite speak of her virgin allure, has yet a youth
and grace which lend themselves to the fondness of the arts. Boston is
fast becoming of the size of Paris, but if I have not misread her
future she will be careful not to pass it, and become as New York is.

We were so alarmed by this reasoning that we asked in considerable
dismay: But what shall we do? We could not help growing; perhaps we
wished to overgrow; but is there no such thing as ungrowing? When the
fair, when the sex which we instinctively attribute to cities, finds
itself too large in its actuality for a Directoire ideal, there are
means, there are methods, of reduction. Is there no remedy, then, for
municipal excess of size? Is there no harmless potion or powder by
which a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the
superabounding fair loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New
York analogous to rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset,
to the sugarless, starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope!
How did Boston manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises,
did she take or use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and
thinking! Our friend continued somewhat inexorably silent, and we
pursued: Do you think that by laying waste our Long Island suburbs, by
burning the whole affiliated Jersey shore, by strangling the Bronx, as
it were, in its cradle, and by confining ourselves rigidly to our
native isle of Manhattan, we could do something to regain our lost
opportunity? We should then have the outline of a fish; true, a
nondescript fish; but the fish was one of the Greek ideals of the
female form. He was silent still, and we gathered courage to press on.
As it is, we are not altogether hideous. We doubt whether there are
not more beautiful buildings in New York now than there are in Boston;
and as for statues, where are the like there of our Macmonnies Hale, of
our Saint-Gaudens Farragut and Sherman, of our Ward Indian Hunter?

The Shaw monument blots them all out, our friend relentlessly
answered. But these are merely details. Our civic good things are
accidental. Boston's are intentional. That is the great, the vital
difference.

It did not occur to us that he was wrong, he had so crushed us under
foot. But, with the trodden worm's endeavor to turn, we made a last
appeal. And with the sky-scraper itself we still expect to do
something, something stupendously beautiful. Say that we have lost our
sky-line! What shall we not have of grandeur, of titanic loveliness,
when we have got a sky-scraper-line?

It seemed to us that here was a point which he could not meet; and,
in fact, he could only say, whether in irony or not, I would rather
not think.

We were silent, and, upon the reflection to which our silence
invited us, we found that we would rather not ourselves think of the
image we had invoked. We preferred to take up the question at another
point.

Well, we said, in your impressions of Bostonian greatness we
suppose that you received the effect of her continued supremacy in
authors as well as authorship, in artists as well as art? You did not
meet Emerson or Longfellow or Lowell or Prescott or Holmes or Hawthorne
or Whittier about her streets, but surely you met their peers, alive
and in the flesh?

No, our friend admitted, not at every corner. But what I did meet
was the effect of those high souls having abode there while on the
earth. The great Boston authors are dead, and the great Boston artists
are worsethey have come to New York; they have not even waited to
die. But whether they have died, or whether they have come to New York,
they have left their inspiration in Boston. In one sense the place that
has known them shall know them no more forever; but in another sense it
has never ceased to know them. I can't say how it is, exactly, but
though you don't see them in Boston, you feel them. But here in New
Yorkour dear, immense, slattern motherwho feels anything of the
character of her great children? Who remembers in these streets Bryant
or Poe or Hallock or Curtis or Stoddard or Stedman, or the other poets
who once dwelt in them? Who remembers even such great editors as
Greeley or James Gordon Bennett or Godkin or Dana? What malignant
magic, what black art, is it that reduces us all to one level of
forgottenness when we are gone, and even before we are gone? Have those
high souls left their inspiration here, for common men to breathe the
breath of finer and nobler life from? I won't abuse the millionaires
who are now our only great figures; even the millionaires are gone when
they go. They die, and they leave no sign, quite as if they were so
many painters and poets. You can recall some of their names, but not
easily. No, if New York has any hold upon the present from the past, it
isn't in the mystical persistence of such spirits among us.

Well, we retorted, hardily, we have no need of them. It is the
high souls of the future which influence us.

Our friend looked at us as if he thought there might be something in
what we said. Will you explain? he asked.

One of those recurrent selves who frequent the habitat of the Easy
Chair, with every effect of exterior identities, looked in and said,
before he sat down, and much before he was asked to sit down, Are you
one of those critics of smart or swell society (or whatever it's called
now) who despise it because they can't get into it, or one of those
censors who won't go into it because they despise it?

Your question, we replied, seems to be rather offensive, but we
don't know that it's voluntarily so, and it's certainly interesting. On
your part, will you say what has prompted you, just at the moment, to
accost us with this inquiry? Before he could answer, we hastened to
add: By-the-way, what a fine, old-fashioned, gentlemanly word
accost is! People used to accost one another a great deal in polite
literature. 'Seeing her embarrassment from his abrupt and vigorous
stare, he thus accosted her.' Or, 'Embarrassed by his fixed and
penetrating regard, she timidly accosted him.' It seems to us that we
remember a great many passages like these. Why has the word gone out?
It was admirably fitted for such junctures, and it was so polished by
use that it slipped from the pen without any effort of the brain,
and

I have no time for idle discussions of a mere literary nature, our
other self returned. I am very full of the subject which I have sprung
upon you, and which I see you are trying to shirk.

Not at all, we smilingly retorted. We will answer you according
to your folly without the least reluctance. We are not in smart or
swell society because we cannot get in; but at the same time we would
not get in if we could, because we despise it too much. We wonder, we
continued, speculatively, why we always suspect the society satirist
of suffering from a social snub? It doesn't in the least follow. Was
Pope, when he invited his S'in' John to

'leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings'

goaded to magnanimity by a slight from royalty? Was Mr. Benson when
he came over here from London excluded from the shining first circles
of New York and Newport, which are apparently reflected with such
brilliant fidelity in The Relentless City, and was he wreaking
an unworthy resentment in portraying our richly moneyed, blue-blooded
society to the life? How are manners ever to be corrected with a smile
if the smile is always suspected of being an agonized grin, the
contortion of the features by the throes of a mortified spirit? Was
George William Curtis in his amusing but unsparing Potiphar Papers


Ah, now you are shouting! our other self exclaimed.

Your slang is rather antiquated, we returned, with grave severity.
But just what do you mean by it in this instance?

I mean that manners are never corrected with a smile, whether of
compassion or of derision. The manners that are bad, that are silly,
that are vulgar, that are vicious, go on unchastened from generation to
generation. Even the good manners don't seem to decay: simplicity,
sincerity, kindness, don't really go out, any more than the other
things, and fortunately the other things are confined only to a small
group in every civilization, to the black sheep of the great,
whity-brown or golden-fleeced human family.

What has all this vague optimism to do with the Potiphar Papers
and smart society and George William Curtis? we brought the intruder
sharply to book.

A great deal, especially the part relating to the continuity of bad
manners. I've just been reading an extremely clever little book by a
new writer, called New York Society on Parade, which so far as
its basal facts are concerned might have been written by the writer of
'Our Best Society' and the other Potiphar Papers. The
temperament varies from book to book; Mr. Ralph Pulitzer has a neater
and lighter touch than George William Curtis; his book is more compact,
more directly and distinctly a study, and it is less alloyed with the
hopes of society reform which could be more reasonably indulged
fifty-six years ago. Do you remember when 'Our Best Society' came out
in the eldest Putnam's Magazine, that phoenix of monthlies which
has since twice risen from its ashes? Don't pretend that our common
memory doesn't run back to the year 1853! We have so many things in
common that I can't let you disgrace the firm by any such vain
assumption of extreme youth!

Why should we assume it? The Easy Chair had then been three years
firmly on its legs, or its rockers, and the succession of great
spirits, now disembodied, whom its ease invited, were all more or less
in mature flesh. We remember that paper on 'Our Best Society' vividly,
and we recall the shock that its facts concerning the Upper Ten
Thousand of New York imparted to the innocent, or at least the
virtuous, Lower Twenty Millions inhabiting the rest of the United
States. Do you mean to say that the Four Hundred of this day are no
better than the Ten Thousand of that? Has nothing been gained for
quality by that prodigious reduction in quantity?

On the contrary, the folly, the vanity, the meanness, the
heartlessness, the vulgarity, have only been condensed and
concentrated, if we are to believe Mr. Pulitzer; and I don't see why we
should doubt him. Did you say you hadn't seen his very shapely little
study? It takes, with all the unpitying sincerity of a kodak, the
likeness of our best society in its three most characteristic aspects;
full-face at dinner, three-quarters-face at the opera, and profile at a
ball, where proud beauty hides its face on the shoulder of haughty
commercial or financial youth, and moneyed age dips its nose in
whatever symbolizes the Gascon wine in the paternal library. Mr.
Pulitzer makes no attempt at dramatizing his persons. There is no
ambitious Mrs. Potiphar with a longing for fashionable New York worlds
to conquer, yet with a secret heartache for the love of her country
girlhood; no good, kind, sordid Potiphar bewildered and bedevilled by
the surroundings she creates for him; no soft Rev. Cream Cheese,
tenderly respectful of Mammon while ritually serving God; no factitious
Ottoman of a Kurz Pasha, laughingly yet sadly observant of us playing
at the forms of European society. Those devices of the satirist
belonged to the sentimentalist mood of the Thackerayan epoch. But it is
astonishing how exactly history repeats itself in the facts of the ball
in 1910 from the ball of 1852. The motives, the personnel,
almost the materiel, the incidents, are the same. I should think
it would amuse Mr. Pulitzer, imitating nature from his actual
observation, to find how essentially his study is the same with that of
Curtis imitating nature fifty-seven years ago. There is more of nature
in bulk, not in variety, to be imitated now, but as Mr. Pulitzer
studies it in the glass of fashion, her mean, foolish, selfish face is
the same. He would find in the sketches of the Mid-Victorian satirist
all sorts of tender relentings and generous hopes concerning the 'gay'
New York of that time which the Early Edwardian satirist cannot indulge
concerning the gay New York of this time. It seems as if we had really
gone from bad to worse, not qualitativelywe couldn'tbut
quantitatively. There is more money, there are more men, more women,
but otherwise our proud world is the proud world of 1853.

You keep saying the same thing with 'damnable iterance,' we
remarked. Don't you suppose that outside of New York there is now a
vast society, as there was then, which enjoys itself sweetly, kindly,
harmlessly? Is there no gentle Chicago or kind St. Louis, no pastoral
Pittsburg, no sequestered Cincinnati, no bucolic Boston, no friendly
Philadelphia, where 'the heart that is humble may look for'
disinterested pleasure in the high-society functions of the day or
night? Does New York set the pace for all these places, and are dinners
given there as here, not for the delight of the guests, but as the dire
duty of the hostesses? Do the inhabitants of those simple sojourns go
to the opera to be seen and not to hear? Do they follow on to balls
before the piece is done only to bear the fardels of ignominy heaped
upon them by the german's leaders, or to see their elders and fatters
getting all the beautiful and costly favors while their own young and
gracile loveliness is passed slighted by because they give no balls
where those cruel captains can hope to shine in the van? It seems to us
that in our own far primenow well-nigh lost in the mists of
antiquitylife was ordered kindlier; that dinners and opera-parties
and dances were given

'To bless and never to ban.'

Very likely, on the low society level on which our joint life
moved, our other self replied, with his unsparing candor. You know we
were a country village, city-of-the-second-class personality. Even in
the distant epoch painted in the Potiphar Papers the motives of
New York society were the same as now. It was not the place where birth
and rank and fame relaxed or sported, as in Europe, or where ardent
innocence played and feasted as in the incorrupt towns of our interior.
If Curtis once represented it rightly, it was the same ridiculous,
hard-worked, greedy, costly, stupid thing which Mr. Pulitzer again
represents it.

And yet, we mused aloud, this is the sort of thing which the
'unthinking multitude' who criticise, or at least review, books are
always lamenting that our fiction doesn't deal with. Why, in its
emptiness and heaviness, its smartness and dulness, it would be the
death of our poor fiction!

Well, I don't know, our counterpart responded. If our fiction
took it on the human ground, and ascertained its inner pathos, its real
lamentableness, it might do a very good thing with those clubmen and
society girls and grandes dames. But that remains to be seen. In
the mean time it is very much to have such a study of society as Mr.
Pulitzer has given us. For the most part it is 'satire with no pity in
it,' but there's here and there a touch of compassion, which moves the
more because of its rarity. When the author notes that here and there a
pretty dear finds herself left with no one to take her out to supper at
the ball, his few words wring the heart. 'These poor victims of their
sex cannot, like the men, form tables of their own. All that each can
do is to disappear as swiftly and as secretly as possible, hurrying
home in humiliation for the present and despair for the future.'

Do such cruel things really happen in our best society? we
palpitated, in an anguish of sympathy.

Such things and worse, our other self responded, as when in the
german the fair debutante sees the leader advancing toward her with a
splendid and costly favor, only to have him veer abruptly off to bestow
it on some fat elderling who is going to give the next ball. But Mr.
Pulitzer, though he has these spare intimations of pity, has none of
the sentiment which there is rather a swash of in the Potiphar
Papers. It's the difference between the Mid-Victorian and the Early
Edwardian point of view. Both satirists are disillusioned, but in the
page of Curtis there is

'The tender grace of a day that is dead'

and the soft suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page
of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both
are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the
distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed,
well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and
brokers' offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners and opera-boxes
and dances of fashion. 'The girls and women are of a higher average of
beauty than any European ball-room could produce. The men, too, are
generally well built, tall, and handsome, easily distinguishable from
the waiters,' Mr. Pulitzer assures us.

Well, oughtn't that to console? we defied our other self. Come!
It's a great thing to be easily distinguishable from the waiters, when
the waiters are so often disappointed 'remittance men' of good English
family, or the scions of Continental nobility. We mustn't ask
everything.

No, and apparently the feeding is less gross than it was in
Curtis's less sophisticated time. Many of the men seem still to smoke
and booze throughout the night with the host in his 'library,' but the
dancing youth don't get drunk as some of them did at Mrs. Potiphar's
supper, and people don't throw things from their plates under the
table.

Well, why do you say, then, that there is no change for the better
in our best society, that there is no hope for it?

Did I say that? If I did, I will stick to it. We must let our best
society be as it now imagines itself. I don't suppose that in all that
gang of beautiful, splendid, wasteful, expensively surfeited people
there are more than two or three young men of intellectual prowess or
spiritual distinction, though there must be some clever and brilliant
toadies of the artist variety. In fact, Mr. Pulitzer says as much
outright; and it is the hard lot of some of the arts to have to tout
for custom among the vulgar ranks of our best society.

Very well, then, we said, with considerable resolution, we must
change the popular ideal of the best society. We must have a four
hundred made up of the most brilliant artists, authors, doctors,
professors, scientists, musicians, actors, and ministers, with their
wives, daughters, and sisters, who will walk to one another's dinners,
or at worst go by trolley, and occupy the cheaper seats at the opera,
and dance in small and early assemblages, and live in
seven-room-with-bath flats. Money must not count at all in the choice
of these elect and beautiful natures. The question is, how shall we get
the dense, unenlightened masses to regard them as the best society; how
teach the reporters to run after them, and the press to chronicle their
entertainments, engagements, marriages, divorces, voyages to and from
Europe, and the other facts which now so dazzle the common fancy when
it finds them recorded in the society intelligence of the newspapers?

Yes, as General Sherman said when he had once advocated the
restriction of the suffrage and had been asked how he was going to get
the consent of the majority whose votes he meant to take away'yes,
that is the devil of it.'

We were silent for a time, and then we suggested, Don't you think
that a beginning could be made by those real elite we have decided on
refusing to let associate with what now calls itself our best society?

But hasn't our soi-disant best society already made that
beginning for its betters by excluding them? our other self responded.

There is something in what you say, we reluctantly assented, but
by no means everything. The beginning you speak of has been made at the
wrong end. The true beginning of society reform must be made by the
moral, aesthetic, and intellectual superiors of fashionable society as
we now have it. The grandes dames must be somehow persuaded that
to be really swell, really smart, or whatever the last word for the
thing is, they must search Who's Who in New York for men and
women of the most brilliant promise and performance and invite them.
They must not search the banks and brokers' offices and lawyers'
offices for their dancing-men, but the studios, the editorial-rooms,
the dramatic agencies, the pulpits, for the most gifted young artists,
assignment men, interviewers, actors, and preachers, and apply to the
labor-unions for the cleverest and handsomest artisans; they must look
up the most beautiful and intelligent girl-students of all the arts and
sciences, and department stores for cultivated and attractive
salesladies. Then, when all such people have received cards to dinners
or dances, it will only remain for them to have previous engagements,
and the true beginning is made. Come! You can't say the thing is
impossible.

Two aging if not aged poets, one much better if not much older than
the other, were talking of the Muse as she was in their day and of the
Muse as she is in this. At the end, their common mind was that she was
a far more facile Muse formerly than she is now. In other words, as the
elder and better poet put it, they both decided that many, many pieces
of verse are written in these times, and hidden away in the multitude
of the magazines, which in those times would have won general
recognition if not reputation for the authors; they would have been
remembered from month to month, and their verses copied into the
newspapers from the two or three periodicals then published, and, if
they were not enabled to retire upon their incomes, they would have
been in the enjoyment of a general attention beyond anything money can
buy at the present day. This conclusion was the handsomer in the two
poets, because they had nothing to gain and something to lose by it if
their opinion should ever become known. It was in a sort the confession
of equality, and perhaps even inferiority, which people do not make,
unless they are obliged to it, in any case. But these poets were
generous even beyond their unenvious tribe, and the younger, with a
rashness which his years measurably excused, set about verifying his
conviction in a practical way, perhaps the only practical way.

He asked his publishers to get him all the American magazines
published; and has the home-keeping reader any notion of the vastness
of the sea on which this poet had embarked in his daring exploration?
His publishers sent him a list of some eighty-two monthly periodicals
in all kinds, which, when he had begged them to confine it to the
literary kind, the aesthetic kind only, amounted to some fifty. By far
the greater number of these, he found, were published in New York, but
two were from Philadelphia, one from Boston, one from Indianapolis, and
one even from Chicago; two were from the Pacific Slope generally. That
is to say, in this city there are issued every month about forty-five
magazines devoted to belles-lettres, of varying degrees of excellence,
not always connoted by their varying prices. Most of them are of the
ten-cent variety, and are worth in most cases ten cents, and in a few
cases twenty-five or thirty-five cents, quite like those which ask such
sums for themselves. The cheapest are not offensive to the eye
altogether, as they lie closed on the dealer's counter, though when you
open them you find them sometimes printed on paper of the wood-pulp,
wood-pulpy sort, and very loathly to the touch. Others of the cheapest
present their literature on paper apparently as good as that of the
dearest; and as it is not always money which buys literary value,
especially from the beginners in literature, there seemed every reason
for the poet to hope that there would be as good poetry in the one sort
as in the other. In his generous animation, he hoped to find some good
poetry on the wood-pulp paper just as in the Golden Age he might have
found it carved by amorous shepherds on the bark of trees.

He promised himself a great and noble pleasure from his verification
of the opinion he shared with that elder and better poet, and if his
delight must be mixed with a certain feeling of reserved superiority,
it could hardly be less a delight for that reason. In turning critic,
the friendliest critic, he could not meet these dear and fair young
poets on their own level, but he could at least keep from them, and
from himself as much as possible, the fact that he was looking down on
them. All the magazines before him were for the month of January, and
though it was possible that they might have shown a certain exhaustion
from their extraordinary efforts in their Christmas numbers, still
there was a chance of the overflow of riches from those numbers which
would trim the balance and give them at least the average poetic value.
At this point, however, it ought to be confessed that the poet, or
critic, was never so willing a reader as writer of occasional verse,
and it cannot be denied that there was some girding up of the loins for
him before the grapple with that half-hundred of magazines. Though he
took them at their weakest point, might they not be too much for him?

He fetched a long breath, and opened first that magazine, clarum
et venerabile nomen, from which he might reasonably expect the
greatest surprises of merit in the verse. There were only two pieces,
and neither seemed to him of the old-time quality, but neither was such
as he would himself have perhaps rejected if he had been editor. Then
he plunged at the heap, and in a fifteen-cent magazine of recent renown
he found among five poems a good straight piece of realistic
characterization which did much to cheer him. In this, a little piece
of two stanzas, the author had got at the heart of a good deal of
America. In another cheap magazine, professing to be devoted wholly to
stories, he hoped for a breathing-space, and was tasked by nothing less
familiar than Swift's versification of a well-known maxim of La
Rouchefoucauld. In a ten-cent magazine which is too easily the best of
that sort, he found two pieces of uncommon worth, which opened the way
so promisingly, indeed, for happier fortunes that he was not as much
surprised as he might later have been in finding five poems, all good,
in one of the four greater, or at least dearer, magazines. One of these
pieces was excellent landscape, and another a capital nature piece; if
a third was somewhat strained, it was also rather strong, and a fourth
had the quiet which it is hard to know from repose. Two poems in
another of the high-priced magazines were noticeable, one for sound
poetic thinking, and the other as very truthfully pathetic. The two in
a cheap magazine, by two Kentucky poets, a song and a landscape, were
one genuinely a song, and the other a charming communion with nature.
In a pair of periodicals devoted to outdoor life, on the tamer or
wilder scale, there were three poems, one celebrating the delights of a
winter camp, which he found simple, true in feeling, and informal in
phrasing; another full of the joy of a country ride, very songy, very
blithe, and original; and a third a study of scenery which it realized
to the mind's eye, with some straining in the wording, but much
felicity in the imagining. A Mid-Western magazine had an excellent
piece by a poet of noted name, who failed to observe that his poem
ended a stanza sooner than he did. In a periodical devoted to short
stories, or abandoned to them, there were two good pieces, one of them
delicately yet distinctly reproducing certain poetic aspects of New
York, and giving the sense of a fresh talent. Where the critic would
hardly have looked for them, in a magazine of professed fashion and
avowed smartness, he came upon three pieces, one sweet and fine, one
wise and good, one fresh and well turned. A newer periodical, rather
going in for literary quality, had one fine piece, with a pretty
surprise in it, and another touched with imaginative observation.

The researches of the critic carried him far into the night, or at
least hours beyond his bedtime, and in the dreamy mood in which he
finally pursued them he was more interested in certain psychological
conditions of his own than in many of the verses. Together with a
mounting aversion to the work, he noted a growing strength for it. He
could dispatch a dozen poems in almost as many minutes, and not slight
them, either; but he no longer jumped to his work. He was aware of
trying to cheat himself in it, of pretending that the brief space
between titles in the table of contents, which naturally implied a
poem, sometimes really indicated a short bit of prose. He would run his
eye hastily over an index, and seek to miss rather than find the word
poem repeated after a title, and when this ruse succeeded he would go
back to the poem he had skipped with the utmost unwillingness. If his
behavior was sinful, he was duly punished for it, in the case of a
magazine which he took up well toward midnight, rejoicing to come upon
no visible sign of poetry in it. But his glance fell to a grouping of
titles in a small-print paragraph at the bottom of the page, and he
perceived, on close inspection, that these were all poems, and that
there were eighteen of them.

He calculated, roughly, that he had read from eighty-five to a
hundred poems before he finished; after a while he ceased to take
accurate count as he went on, but a subsequent review of the magazines
showed that his guess was reasonably correct. From this review it
appeared that the greater number of the magazines published two poems
in each month, while several published but one, and several five or
seven or four. Another remarkable fact was that the one or two in the
more self-denying were as bad as the whole five or seven or nine or
eighteen of those which had more freely indulged themselves in verse.
Yet another singular feature of the inquiry was that one woman had a
poem in five or six of the magazines, and, stranger yet, always a good
poem, so that no editor would have been justified in refusing it. There
was a pretty frequent recurrence of names in the title-pages, and
mostly these names were a warrant of quality, but not always of the
author's best quality. The authorship was rather equally divided
between the sexes, and the poets were both young and old, or as old as
poets ever can be.

When the explorer had returned from the search, which covered
apparently a great stretch of time, but really of space, he took his
notes and went with them to that elder friend of his whose generous
enthusiasm had prompted his inquiry. Together they looked them over and
discussed the points evolved. Then what is your conclusion? the elder
of the two demanded. Do you still think I was right, or have you come
to a different opinion?

Oh, how should I safely confess that I am of a different opinion?
You would easily forgive me, but what would all those hundred poets
whom I thought not so promising as you believed do to my next book?
Especially what would the poetesses?

There is something in that. But you need not be explicit. If you
differ with me, you can generalize. What, on the whole, was the
impression you got? Had none of the pieces what we call distinction,
for want of a better word or a clearer idea?

I understand. No, I should say, not one; though here and there one
nearly had itso nearly that I held my breath from not being quite
sure. But, on the other hand, I should say that there was a good deal
of excellence, if you know what that means.

I can imagine, the elder poet said. It is another subterfuge.
What do you really intend?

Why, that the level was pretty high. Never so high as the sky, but
sometimes as high as the sky-scraper. There was an occasional tallness,
the effect, I think, of straining to be higher than the thought or the
feeling warranted. And some of the things had a great deal of
naturalness.

Come! That isn't so bad.

But naturalness can be carried to a point where it becomes
affectation. This happened in some cases where I thought I was going to
have some pleasure of the simplicity, but found at last that the
simplicity was a pose. Sometimes there was a great air of being
untrammelled. But there is such a thing as being informal, and there is
such a thing as being unmannerly.

Yes?

I think that in the endeavor to escape from convention our poets
have lost the wish for elegance, which was a prime charm of the Golden
Age. Technically, as well as emotionally, they let themselves loose too
much, and the people of the Golden Age never let themselves loose.
There is too much Nature in them, which is to say, not enough; for,
after all, in her little aesthetic attempts, Nature is very modest.

The elder poet brought the younger sharply to book. Now you are
wandering. Explain again.

Why, when you and I were youngyou were always and always will be
young

None of that!

It seemed to me that we wished to be as careful of the form as the
most formal of our poetic forebears, and that we would not let the
smallest irregularity escape us in our study to make the form perfect.
We cut out the tall word; we restrained the straining; we tried to keep
the wording within the bounds of the dictionary; we wished for beauty
in our work so much that our very roughness was the effect of
hammering; the grain we left was where we had used the file to produce
it.

Was it? And you say that with these new fellows it isn't so?

Well, what do you say to such a word as 'dankening,' which occurred
in a very good landscape?

One such word in a hundred poems?

One such word in a million would have been too many. It made me
feel that they would all have liked to say 'dankening,' or something of
the sort. And in the new poets, on other occasions, I have found faulty
syntax, bad rhymes, limping feet. The editors are to blame for that,
when it happens. The editor who printed 'dankening' was more to blame
than the poet who wrote it, and loved the other ugly word above all his
other vocables. The elder poet was silent, and the other took fresh
courage. Yes, I say it! You were wrong in your praise of the present
magazine verse at the cost of that in our day. When we were commencing
poets, the young or younger reputations were those of Stedman, of
Bayard Taylor, of the Stoddards, of Aldrich, of Celia Thaxter, of Rose
Terry, of Harriet Prescott, of Bret Harte, of Charles Warren Stoddard,
of the Piatts, of Fitz James O'Brien, of Fitzhugh Ludlow, of a dozen
more, whom the best of the newest moderns cannot rival. These were all
delicate and devoted and indefatigable artists and lovers of form. It
cannot do the later generation any good to equal them with ours.

There is something in what you say. The elder poet was silent for
a time. Then he asked, Out of the hundred poems you read in your fifty
magazines, how many did you say were what you would call good?

His junior counted up, and reported, About twenty-four.

Well, don't you call that pretty fair, in a hundred? I do. Reflect
that these were all the magazines of one month, and it is probable that
there will be as many good poems in the magazines of every month in the
year. That will give us two hundred and eighty-eight good poems during
1907. Before the first decade of the new century is ended, we shall
have had eleven hundred and fifty-two good magazine poems. Do you
suppose that as many good magazine poems were written during the last
four years of the first decade of the eighteenth century? Can you name
as many yourself?

Certainly not. Nobody remembers the magazine poems of that time,
and nobody will remember the poems of the four years ending the present
decade.

Do you mean to say that not one of them is worth remembering?

The younger poet paused a moment. Then he said, with the air of a
cross-examined witness, Under advice of counsel, I decline to answer.

On a night well toward its noon, many years ago, a friend of the
Easy Chair (so close as to be at the same time its worst enemy) was
walking wearily up and down in the station at Portland, Maine, and
wondering if the time for his train to start would ever come, and, if
the time did come, whether his train would really take advantage of
that opportunity to leave Portland. It was, of course, a night train,
and of course he had engaged a lower berth in the sleeping-car; there
are certain things that come by nature with the comfortable classes to
which the friend of the Easy Chair belonged. He would no more have
thought of travelling in one of the empty day coaches side-tracked in
the station than he would have thought of going by stage, as he could
remember doing in his boyhood. He stopped beside the cars and
considered their potential passengers with amaze and compassion; he
laughed at the notion of his being himself one of them; and, when he
turned his back on them, he was arrested by the sight of an elderly
pair looking from the vantage of the platform into the interior of a
lighted Pullman parlor-car which, for reasons of its own, was waiting
in luminous detachment apart from the day coaches. There was something
engaging in the gentle humility of the elderly pair who peered into the
long, brilliant saloon with an effect not so much of ignorance as of
inexperience. They were apparently not so rustic as they were what
another friend of the Easy Chair calls villaginous; and they seemed not
of the commonest uninformed villaginosity, but of general intelligence
such as comes of reading and thinking of many modern things which one
has never seen. As the eavesdropper presently made out from a colloquy
unrestrained by consciousness of him, they had never seen a parlor-car
before, except perhaps as it flashed by their meek little home depot
with the rest of some express train that never stopped there.

It is splendid, John, the woman said, holding by the man's
arm while she leaned forward to the window which she tiptoed to reach
with her eager eyes.

I guess it's all of that, the man consented, sadly.

I presume we sha'n't ever go in one, she suggested.

Not likely, he owned, in the same discouraged tone.

They were both silent for a time. Then the woman said, with a deep,
hopeless aspiration, Dear! I wish I could see inside one, once!

The man said nothing, and if he shared her bold ambition he made no
sign.

The eavesdropper faltered near their kind backs, wishing for
something more from them which should give their souls away, but they
remained silently standing there, and he did not somehow feel
authorized to make them reflect that, if the car was lighted up, it
must be open, and that the friendly porter somewhere within would not
mind letting them look through it under his eye. Perhaps they did
reflect, and the woman was trying to embolden the man to the hardy
venture. In the end they did not attempt it, but they turned away with
another sigh from the woman which found its echo in the eavesdropper's
heart. Doubtless if they had penetrated that splendid interior without
having paid for seats, it would, in some fine, mystical sort, have
pauperized them; it would have corrupted them; they would have wished
after that always to travel in such cars, when clearly they could not
afford it; very possibly it might have led to their moral if not
financial ruin. So he tried to still his bosom's ache, but he could
never quite forget that gentle pair with their unrequited longing, and
the other day they came almost the first thing into his mind when he
read that a great German steamship company had some thoughts of putting
on a train of Pullman cars from the port of arrival to the mercantile
metropolis which was the real end of their ships' voyages. He thought,
whimsically, perversely, how little difference it would make to that
pair, how little to those measureless most whose journeys shall end in
heaven, where Pullman passengers, or even passengers by the ordinary
European first-class cars, may be only too glad to meet them. He gave a
looser rein to his thoughts and considered how very little the ordinary
necessities of life, such as Pullman cars and taxicabs and electric
radiators and non-storage chickens and unsalted butter concern the
great mass of the saints, who would find them the rarest luxuries, and
could hardly be imagined coveting them; and then from this wild revery
he fell to asking himself whether a Pullman train would be such a great
advance or advantage over the old-fashioned European first-class
carriages in which he had been so long content to travel with the
native nobility. Self-brought to book on this point, he had to own that
he had once had moments of thinking in a German second-class car that
he would not change to an American Pullman if he could for even less
than a third more money. He recalled a pleasant run from Crewe to
Edinburgh in a third-class English car, when he never once thought of a
Pullman car except to think it was no better. To be sure, this was
after two-thirds of his third-class fellow-passengers had got out, and
he was left to the sole enjoyment of two-thirds of the seats. It is the
luxury of space which your more money buys you in England, where no one
much lower than a duke or a prime minister now goes first class for a
long haul. For short hauls it is different, and on the Continent it is
altogether different. There you are often uncomfortably crowded in the
first-class carriages, and doubtless would be in a Pullman if there
were any, so that if you are wise, or only well informed, you will give
the guard a shilling to telegraph before leaving London and get you a
number on the Rapide from Calais to Paris.

It is astonishing how quickly knowledge of any such advisable
precaution spreads among even such arrogantly stupid people as
first-class passengers ordinarily are. By the time a certain train had
started for Dover with that friend of the Easy Chair's already
mentioned, every soul in his first-class compartment had telegraphed
ahead, and when they arrived in Calais the earliest Englishman who got
past the customs ran ahead and filled the racks of the carriage with
his hand-baggage, so that the latest Frenchman was obliged to jump up
and down and scream, and perhaps swear in his strange tongue, before he
could find room for his valise, and then calm down and show himself the
sweetest and civilest of men, and especially the obedient humble
servant of the Englishman who had now made a merit of making way for
his bag.

At this point the fable teaches that money will not buy everything
in European travel, though some Americans imagine it will. It will not,
for instance, buy comfort or decency, though it will secure privacy in
a French sleeper between Paris and Marseilles either way. For an
augmentation of forty-five francs, or nine dollars, on the price of a
first-class ticket, it will buy you a berth in a small pen which you
must share with another animal, and be tossed hither and yon, night
long, as in the berth of a Bermuda steamer. Second-class passengers in
France or Italy cannot buy a berth in a sleeper for any money, and they
may go hang or stand, for all the International Sleeping-Car Company
cares; and this suggests the question whether in our own free and equal
land the passengers in the ordinary day coaches are ever invited, by
the first call or the last, to share the hospitalities of our
dining-cars; or are these restricted to the proud stomachs of the
Pullman passengers?

No, no; the privacy of a French sleeping-car is all very well, but
for decency give our friend a good, old-fashioned Pullman sleeper at a
third the money, with its curtains swaying with the motion of the car
and muting the long-drawn, loud-drawn breathing of the serried sleepers
behind them. To be sure, in the morning, when stooping backs begin to
round the curtains out, and half-shod feet to thrust into the narrow
gangway between them, the effect is of a familiarity, an intimacy; but
so much trust, so much brotherly kindness goes with it all that you
could not call it indecency, though certainly you could not claim it
privacy. It only proves, as that friend of ours was saying, that money
cannot buy everything, and that, if you expect the Pullman parlor-cars
to be an improvement on the German first-class cars, you will be
disappointed, probably. First-class cars vary much all over Europe;
even second-class cars do. In Austria they are not nearly so good as in
Germany, and in Italypoor, dear Italy!they are worse still. That is
because, the enemies of socialism say, the roads are state roads, or
because, the friends of socialism say, the expropriated companies have
dumped their worn-out rolling-stock on the commonwealth, which must
bear the shame of it with the stranger. Between these clashing claims
we will not put our blade. All we say is that Italian railroad travel
is as bad as heart could wishthe heart that loves Italy and holds
dear the memory of the days when there were few railroads, if any,
there, and one still went by diligence or vettura. The only
absolutely good railroad travel is in England, where the
corridor car imagined from the Pullman has realized the most exacting
ideal of the traveller of any class. In the matter of dining-cars we
have stood still (having attained perfection at a bound), while the
English diner has shot ahead in simplicity and quality of refection.
With us a dollar buys more dinner than you wish or like; with them
three shillings pay for an elegant sufficiency, and a tip of sixpence
purchases an explicit gratitude from the waiter which a quarter is
often helpless to win from his dark antitype with us. The lunch served
on the steamer train from London to Liverpool leaves the swollen,
mistimed dinner on the Boston express

But what about that 5 P.M. breakfast which you got, no longer ago
than last September, on the express between Salisbury and Exeter? our
friend exults to ask; and we condescend to answer with forced candor:

Yes, that was rather droll. No Englishman would dream of ordering
afternoon tea consisting of chops, boiled potatoes, and a pot of
souchong, and, if we chose to do so, we took a serious chance. But
starvation will drive one to anything; we had had nothing to eat since
leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the English air this is
truly famine. Besides, the amiable agent who came to our compartment
for our order pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready in
twenty minutes; and so they were, and so were the chops, and so, of
course, was the tea. What he had failed to specify was that the
dining-car had been left, by divers defections at the junctions passed,
the last car in our train, and that it was now straining at its leash
in wild leaps and bounds. One reached it by passing through more
corridor cars than there are Pullmans and day coaches in a west-bound
Lake Shore train, and when one arrived one reeled and flounced into
one's seat by such athletics as one uses in a Bermuda steamer (or did
use in the old fifteen-hundred-ton kind) crossing the Gulf Stream. When
once comparatively secure in one's chair, the combat with the lunch
began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at home there, for there was
nothing for it but to stab the potatoes, and all one's cunning of fence
was needed to hold one's own with the chops. But how delicious they
were! How the first mealed and the last melted in the mouth; and the
tea, when once poured from the dizzy height at which the pot had to be
held, and the wild whirl in which the cup had to be caught to the lips,
how it cheered without inebriating, and how the spirit rose to meet it!
The waiter, dancing and swaying like any ship's steward, served the
stray Americans with as much respectful gravity as if they had been
county-family English and he had been for generations in their service.
He did not deprecate the capers of the car, but only casually owned
that, when it happened to be the last in the train, it did pitch about
a bit, sir.

No, England is the only country where you can get the whole worth of
your money in railroad travel, and the well-to-do sinner can enjoy the
comfort which must be his advance recompense in this world for the
happiness he cannot warrantably count upon in the next. That steamer
train of Pullmans in Germany will never contest the palm with the
English corridor train; nor will our palatial, porterless depots vie
with the simplest of these English wayside stations, where the soft
endearments of the railway servants penetrate to the very interior of
the arriving stranger's compartment and relieve him of all anxiety for
his hand-baggage. Then the cloak-room, that refuge of temporary
sojourn, where his baggage remains in the porter's charge till it is
put back into the train, who will contend that our parcels' windows,
with their high counters fencing the depositor from the grim youths
standing like receiving and paying tellers within, compare with the
English cloak-room? Its very name descends from the balls and
assemblies of the past, and graces the public enjoyment of its
convenience with something of the courtesy and dignity of the exclusive
pleasures of the upper classes; it brings to one sense a vision of
white shoulders bent over trim maids slippering slim feet, and to
another the faint, proud odors of flowers that withered a hundred years
ago.

But what vain concession is this to the outworn ideals of a state
and a condition justly superseded! How far we have got from that gentle
pair with whom we began peering into the parlor-car in Portland, Maine!
To such as they it will matter little whether Pullman cars are or are
not put on that steamer train in North Germany. A great danger is that
the vast horde of Americans who travel will forget the immeasurable
majority who remain at home, and will lose in their sophistication the
heaven-glimpsing American point of view. It is very precious, that
point of view, and the foreigner who wins it is a happier man than the
native who purse-proudly puts it away. When we part with the daily
habit of trolleys and begin to think in cabs and taxicabs; when we pass
the line of honest day coaches and buy a seat in the parlor-car; when
we turn from pie, or baked beans, and coffee at the refreshment-counter
and keep our hunger for the table d'hote of the dining-car; when we buy
a room in the steamboat in disdain of the berth that comes with our
ticket; when we refuse to be one of four or even two in the cabin of
the simpler steamers and will not go abroad on any vessel of less than
twenty or thirty thousand tons, with small, separate tables and tuxedos
in the saloon; when we forsake the clothing-store with its democratic
misfit for all figures and order our suits in London, then we begin to
barter away our birthright of republican simplicity, and there is soon
nothing for us but a coronet by marriage in the family or a
quarter-section of public land in northwestern Canada.

There has been altogether too much talk (some of it, we contritely
own, has been ours) of the comparative comforts and discomforts of life
for the better-to-do in Europe and America. In the demand for Pullman
trains between our port of arrival and the end of our journey when we
go to the Continent for a much-needed rest, we are apt to forget the
fellow-citizens whom we saw across the impassable barrier dividing our
first class from them on the steamer, and who will find the
second-class German cars quite good enough for them, and better than
our day coaches at home. If we cannot remember these, then let us
remember those for whom Pullmans are not good enough and who spurn the
dust of our summer ways in their automobiles, and leave the parlor-cars
to our lower-class vulgarity. Such people take their automobiles to
Europe with them, and would not use that possible Pullman train if they
found it waiting for them at the port of arrival in Germany. What is
the use? It will soon not be an affair of automobiles, but of
aeroplanes, at the ports of European arrival, and a Pullman train will
look sadly strange and old to the debarking passengers. No one will
want to take it, as no one would now want to take a bicycle, or even a
bicycle built for two. These things are all comparative; there is
nothing positive, nothing ultimate in the luxuries, the splendors of
life. Soon the last word in them takes on a vulgarity of accent; and
Distinction turns from them with sick and scornful looks averse, and
listens for the

airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.

Simplicity, at the furthest possible remove from all complexity,
will be the next wordthe word that follows the last, the woman's
word.

They had got to that point in their walk and talk where the talk
might be best carried forward by arresting the walk; and they sat down
on a bench of the Ramble in Central Park, and provisionally watched a
man feeding a squirrel with peanuts. The squirrel had climbed up the
leg of the man's trousers and over the promontory above, and the man
was holding very still, flattered by the squirrel's confidence, and
anxious not to frighten it away by any untoward movement; if the
squirrel had been a child bestowing its first intelligent favors upon
him the man could not have been prouder. He was an old fellow, one of
many who pamper the corrupt rodents of the Park, and reduce them from
their native independence to something like the condition of those
pauper wards of the nation on our Indian Reservations, to whom a
blurred image of the chase offers itself at stated intervals in the
slaughter of the Government's dole of beef-cattle.

The friend to whom this imperfect parallel occurred recalled his
thoughts from it and said, with single reference to the man and the
squirrel: I suppose that's an expression of the sort of thing we've
been talking about. Kindness to animals is an impulse, isn't it, of the
'natural piety' embracing the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of
man?

[Illustration: THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK]

I don't think it's quite so modern as that formulation, the other
friend questioned. I was thinking it was very eighteenth-century; part
of the universal humanitarian movement of the time when the master
began to ask himself whether the slave was not also a man and a
brother, and the philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the
day and remembered those in bonds as bound with them.

Yes, you may say that, the first allowed. But benevolence toward
dumb creatures originated very much further back than the eighteenth
century. There was St. Francis of Assisi, you know, who preached to the
birds, didn't he? and Walter von der Vogelweide, who pensioned them.
And several animalscats, crocodiles, cows, and the likeenjoyed a
good deal of consideration among the Egyptians. The serpent used to
have a pretty good time as a popular religion. And what about the
Stoics? They were rather kind to animals, weren't they? Why should
Pliny's Doves have come down to us in mosaic if he cultivated them
solely for the sake of broiled squabs? It's true that the modern Roman,
before the extension of the S.P.C.A. to his city, used his horse
cruelly upon the perfectly unquestionable ground that the poor beast
was not a Christian.

I don't remember about the Stoics exactly, the second friend mused
aloud; and the first let this go, though they both understood that very
likely he not only did not remember, but had never known. They had so
many virtues that they must have been kind to brutes, but I taste
something more Cowperian, more Wordsworthian, than Marcus-Aurelian in
our own kindness. These poets taught me, so far as I could learn, not
to

'enter on my list of friends the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm,'

and

'Never to mix my pleasure or my pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that breathes.'

Yes, but I don't like giving up the Stoics; we may have to come
back to their ground if things keep on going the way they have gone for
the last generation. The Stoics had a high ideal of duty; it's hard to
see that the Christian ideal is higher, though they taught themselves
to be proudly good, and we (if we may still say we when we say
Christians) are always trying to teach ourselves to be humbly good.

What do you mean, the second of the friends demanded, by coming
back to their ground?

Why, the first responded, picking up a twig that opportunely
dropped at his feet, and getting out his knife to whittle it, I
suppose they were the first agnostics, and we who don't so much deny
the Deity as ignore Him

I see, the second answered, sadly. But aren't you throwing up the
sponge for faith rather prematurely? The power of believing has a
tremendous vitality. I heard a Catholic once say to a Protestant
friend, 'You know the Church has outlived schisms much older than
yours.' And inside of Protestantism as well as Catholicism there is a
tremendous power of revival. We have seen it often. After an age of
unbelief an age of belief is rather certain to follow.

Well, well, I'm willing. I'm no more agnostic than you are. I
should be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no
other reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they
were good to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to
have the same barren devotion to duty which has survived my faith as
well as my creed. But why, if I neither expect happiness nor dread
misery, should I still care to do my duty? And I certainly always do.

What, always?

Well, nearly always.

The friends laughed together, and the first said, What a pity the
Gilbertian humor has gone out so; you can't adapt it to a daily need
any longer without the risk of not being followed.

The other sighed. Nearly everything goes out, except duty. If that
went out, I don't think I should have much pleasure in life.

No, you would be dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there
is anything comes direct from the Creative Force, from

'La somma sapienza e il primo amore,'

it is the sense of duty, 'the moral law within us,' which Kant
divined as unmistakably delivered from God to man. I use the old
terminology.

Don't apologize. It still serves our turn; I don't know that
anything else serves it yet. And you make me think of what dear old
M.D. Ctold me shortly after his wife died. He had wished, when they
both owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort in the hope
of another life, to clutch at that straw to save his drowning soul; but
she stopped him. She said, 'There is nothing but duty, the duty we have
wished to do and tried to do.'

The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, and then the
first said, I suppose we all wish to do our duty, even when we don't
try or don't try hard enough.

The other conjectured, Perhaps, after all, it's a question of
strength; wickedness is weakness.

That formula won't always serve; still, it will serve in a good
many cases; possibly most. It won't do to preach it, though.

No, we must cultivate strength of character. I wonder how?

Well, your Stoics

My Stoics?

Anybody's Stoicsdid it by self-denial. When they saw a
pleasure coming their way they sidestepped it; they went round the
corner, and let it go by while they recruited their energies. Then when
they saw a duty coming they stepped out and did it.

It seems very simple. But aren't you rather cynical?

That's what people call one when one puts ethics picturesquely. But
perhaps I've rather overdone it about the Stoics. Perhaps they wouldn't
have refused to enjoy a pleasure at their own expense, at their cost in
some sort of suffering to themselves. They really seem to have invented
the Christian ideal of duty.

And a very good thing. It may be all that will be left of
Christianity in the end, if the Christian hope of reward goes as the
Christian fear of punishment has gone. It seems to have been all there
was of it in the beginning.

The second of the friends said at this, I don't know that I should
go so far as that.

The first returned, Well, I don't know that I should ask you. I
don't know that I go that far myself, he said, and then they laughed
together again.

The man who was feeding the squirrel seemed to have exhausted his
stock of peanuts, and he went away. After some hesitation the squirrel
came toward the two friends and examined their countenances with a
beady, greedy eye. He was really glutted with peanuts, and had buried
the last where he would forget it, after having packed it down in the
ground with his paws.

No, no, the first of the friends said to the squirrel; we are on
the way back to being Stoics and practising the more self-denying
virtues. You won't get any peanuts out of us. For one thing, we haven't
got any.

There's a boy, the second friend dreamily suggested, down by the
boat-house with a basketful.

But I am teaching this animal self-denial. He will be a nobler
squirrel all the rest of his life for not having the peanuts he
couldn't get. That's like what I always try to feel in my own case.
It's what I call character-building. Get along!

The squirrel, to which the last words were addressed, considered a
moment. Then it got along, after having inspected the whittlings at the
feet of the friends to decide whether they were edible.

I thought, the second of the friends said, that your humanity
included kindness to animals.

I am acting for this animal's best good. I don't say but that, if
the peanut-boy had come by with his basket, I shouldn't have yielded to
my natural weakness and given the little brute a paper of them to bury.
He seems to have been rather a saving squirrelwhen he was gorged.

The mellow sunlight of the November day came down through the
tattered foliage, and threw the shadows of the friends on the path
where they sat, with their soft hats pulled over their foreheads. They
were silent so long that when the second of them resumed their
conversation he had to ask, Where were we?

Cultivating force of character in squirrels.

I thought we had got by that.

Then we had come round to ourselves again.

Something like that, the first friend reluctantly allowed.

What a vicious circle! It seems to me that our first duty, if
that's what you mean, is to get rid of ourselves.

Whom should we have left? Other people? We mustn't pamper their
egotism in chastising our own. We must use a great deal of caution in
doing our duty. If I really loved that squirrel, if I were truly kind
to animals, if I studied their best good, as disagreeable friends say
they study ours, I should go after him and give him a hickory-nut that
would wear down his teeth as nature intended; civilization is
undermining the health of squirrels by feeding them peanuts, which
allow their teeth to overgrow.

That is true. Isn't it doing something of the same sort in other
ways for all of us? If I hadn't lost my teeth so long ago, I'm sure I
should feel them piercing from one jaw to another in their inordinate
development. It's duty that keeps down the overgrowths that luxury
incites. By-the-way, what set you thinking so severely about duty this
beautiful Sunday morning? The neglected duty of going to church?

Ah, I call going to church a pleasure. No, I suppose it was an
effect, a reverberation, of the tumult of my struggle to vote for the
right man on Tuesday, when I knew that I was throwing my vote away if I
did vote for him.

But you voted for him?

The first friend nodded.

Which man was it?

What's the use? He was beaten

'That is all you know or need to know.'

Of course he was beaten if it was your duty to vote for him, the
second friend mused. How patient the Creator must be with the result
of His counsel to His creatures! He keeps on communing, commanding, if
we are to believe Kant. It is His one certain way to affirm and
corroborate Himself. Without His perpetual message to the human
conscience, He does not recognizably exist; and yet more than half the
time His mandate sends us to certain defeat, to certain death. It's
enough to make one go in for the other side. Of course, we have to
suppose that the same voice which intimates duty to us intimates duty
to them?

And that they would like to obey it, if they could consistently
with other interests and obligations?

Yes, they juggle with their sense of it; they pretend that the
Voice does not mean exactly what it says. They get out of it that way.

And the great, vital difference between ourselves and them is that
we promptly and explicitly obey it; we don't palter with it in the
slightest; 'we don't bandy words with our sovereign,' as Doctor Johnson
said. I wonder, the speaker added, with the briskness of one to whom a
vivid thought suddenly occurs, how it would work if one went and did
exactly the contrary of what was intimated to the human conscience?

That's not a new idea. There are people who habitually do so, or,
rather, to whom an inverted moral law is delivered.

You mean the people who beat you at the polls last Tuesday?

No, I mean the people in the asylums, some of them. They are said
to hear the voice that bids us do right commanding them to do wrong.
'Thou shalt kill,' they hear it say, 'thou shalt steal, thou shalt bear
false witness, thou shalt commit adultery, thou shalt not honor thy
father and thy mother,' and so on through the Decalogue, with the
inhibition thrown off or put on, as the case may be.

How very hideous! the second friend exclaimed. It's like an
emanation from the Pit. I mean the Pit that used to be. It's been
abolished.

And a very good thing. The noises from it went far to drown the
voice of God, and bewildered some men so that they did not rightly know
what the voice was saying. Now when people hear a voice bidding them do
evil, we know what to do with them.

And you think that the fellows who outvoted you on Tuesday heard
the same voice that you heard; and they disobeyed it?

Ah, it's hard to say. We haven't got to the bottom of such things
yet. Perhaps they disobeyed the voice provisionally, expecting to make
a satisfactory explanation later on. Or perhaps they had put their
civic consciences in the keeping of others, who gave them an official
interpretation of the command, with instructions not to take it
literally.

That's very interesting, the second friend said. Then it's your
idea that no one really prefers to do wrong?

Not outside of the asylums. And even there they can plead
authority. No, no, no! In a world pretty full of evil there isn't any
purely voluntary evil among the sane. When the 'wicked,' as we call
them, do wrong, it is provisionally only; they mean to do right
presently and make it up with the heavenly powers. As long as an
evil-doer lives he means to cease some time to do evil. He may put it
off too long, or until he becomes ethically unsound. You know
Swedenborg found that the last state of sinners was insanity.

Dreadful!

But I've always thought very few reached that state. There's this
curious thing about it all: we are not only ethically prompted by that
inner voice, we are aesthetically prompted; it's a matter of taste as
well as of conduct, too. The virtues are so clean, the vices so
repulsively dirty. Justice is beautifully symmetrical; injustice is so
shapeless, so unbalanced. Truth is such a pure line; falsehood is so
out of drawing. The iniquities make you uncomfortable. The arts deny
them.

The second friend drew a long breath. Then I don't see why there
are so many.

Well, the first friend suggested, there seems to be a difficulty.
Some say that they have to be employed as antitheses; we can't get on
without them, at least at this stage of the proceedings. Perhaps we
shall advance so far that we shall be able to use historical or
accomplished evil for the contrasts by which we shall know actual
good.

I don't see how you make that out.

Why, there are already some regions of the globe where the summer
does not require the antithesis of winter for its consciousness.
Perhaps in the moral world there will yet be a condition in which right
shall not need to contrast itself with wrong. We are still
meteorologically very imperfect.

And how do you expect to bring the condition about? By our always
doing our duty?

The Easy Chair saw at once that its friend was full of improving
conversation, and it let him begin without the least attempt to stay
him; anything of the kind, in fact, would have been a provocation to
greater circumstance in him. He said:

It was Christmas Eve, and I don't know whether he arrived by chance
or design at a time when the heart is supposed to be softest and the
mind openest. It's a time when, unless you look out, you will believe
anything people tell you and do anything they ask you. I must say I was
prepossessed by his appearance; he was fair and slender, and he looked
about thirty-five years old; and when he said at once that he would not
deceive me, but would confess that he was just out of the penitentiary
of a neighboring State where he had been serving a two years' sentence,
I could have taken him in my arms. Even if he had not pretended that he
had the same surname as myself, I should have known him for a brother,
and though I suspected that he was wrong in supposing that his surname
was at all like mine, I was glad that he had sent it in, and so piqued
my curiosity that I had him shown up, instead of having my pampered
menial spurn him from my door, as I might if he had said his name was
Brown, Jones, or Robinson.

We dare say you have your self-justification, we put in at this
point, but you must own that it doesn't appear in what you are saying.
As a good citizen, with the true interests of the poor at heart, you
would certainly have had your pampered menial spurn him from your door.
His being of your name, or claiming to be so, had nothing to do with
his merit or want of it.

Oh, I acknowledge that, and I'll own that there was something in
his case, as he stated it, that appealed to my fancy even more than his
community of surname appealed to my family affection. He said he was a
Scotchman, which I am not, and that he had got a job on a
cattle-steamer, to work his way back to his native port. The steamer
would sail on Monday, and it was now Friday night, and the question
which he hesitated, which he intimated, in terms so tacit that I should
not call them an expression of it, was how he was to live till Monday.

He left the calculation entirely to me, which he might not have
done if he had known what a poor head I had for figures, and I entered
into it with a reluctance which he politely ignored. I had some quite
new two-dollar notes in my pocket-book, the crisp sort, which rustle in
fiction when people take them out to succor the unfortunate or bribe
the dishonest, and I thought I would give him one if I could make it go
round for him till his steamer sailed. I was rather sorry for its being
fresh, but I had no old, shabby, or dirty notes such as one gives to
cases of dire need, you know.

No, we don't know. We so seldom give paper at all; we prefer to
give copper.

Well, that is right; one ought to give copper if the need is very
pressing; if not so pressing, one gives small silver, and so on up. But
here was an instance which involved a more extended application of
alms. 'You know,' I told him, while I was doing my sum in mental
arithmetic, 'there are the Mills hotels, where you can get a bed for
twenty-five cents; I don't remember whether they throw in breakfast or
not.' I felt a certain squalor in my attitude, which was not relieved
by the air of gentle patience with which he listened, my poor namesake,
if not kinsman; we were both at least sons of Adam. He looked not only
gentle, but refined; I made my reflection that this was probably the
effect of being shut up for two years where the winds were not allowed
to visit him roughly, and the reflection strengthened me to say, 'I
think two dollars will tide you over till Monday.' I can't say whether
he thought so, too, but he did not say he did not think so. He left it
quite to me, and I found another mathematical difficulty. There were
three nights' lodging to be paid for, and then he would have a dollar
and a quarter for food. I often spend as much as that on a single
lunch, including a quarter to the waiter, and I wouldn't have liked
making it pay for three days' board. But I didn't say so; I left the
question entirely to him, and he said nothing.

In fact, he was engaged in searching himself for credentials, first
in one pocket, and then in another; but he found nothing better than a
pawn-ticket, which he offered me. 'What's this?' I asked. 'My
overcoat,' he said, and I noted that he had borrowed a dollar and a
half on it. I did not like that; it seemed to me that he was taking
unfair advantage of me, and I said, 'Oh, I think you can get along
without your overcoat.' I'm glad to think now that it hadn't begun to
snow yet, and that I had no prescience of the blizzardwhat the papers
fondly called the Baby Blizzard (such a pretty fancy of theirs!)which
was to begin the next afternoon, wasn't making the faintest threat from
the moonlit sky then. He said, 'It's rather cold,' but I ignored his
position. At the same time, I gave him a quarter.

That was magnificent, but it was not political economy, we
commented. You should have held to your irrefutable argument that he
could get along without his overcoat. You should have told him that he
would not need it on shipboard.

Well, do you know, our friend said, I really did tell him
something like that, and it didn't seem to convince him, though it made
me ashamed. I suppose I was thinking how he could keep close to the
reading-room fire, and I did not trouble to realize that he would not
be asked to draw up his chair when he came in from looking after the
cattle.

It would have been an idle compliment, anyway, we said. You can't
draw up the reading-room chairs on shipboard; they're riveted down.

I remembered afterward. But still I was determined not to take his
overcoat out of pawn, and he must have seen it in my eye. He put back
his pawn-ticket, and did not try to produce any other credentials. I
had noticed that the ticket did not bear the surname we enjoyed in
common; I said to myself that the name of Smith, which it did bear,
must be the euphemism of many who didn't wish to identify themselves
with their poverty even to a pawnbroker. But I said to him, 'Here!' and
I pulled open my table drawer, and took from it a small envelope full
of English coins, which I had been left stranded with on several
returns from Europe; the inhuman stewards had failed to relieve me of
them; and as I always vow, when I have got through our customs, that I
will never go to Europe again, I had often wondered what I should do
with those coins. I now took out the largest and handsomest of them:
'Do you know what that is?' 'Yes,' he said; 'it's two shillings and
sixpencewhat we call a half-crown.' His promptness restored my faith
in him; I saw that he must be what he said; undoubtedly he had been in
the penitentiary; very likely our name was the same; an emotion of
kinship stirred in my heart. 'Here!' I said, and I handed him the coin;
it did not seem so bad as giving him more American money. 'They can
change that on the ship for you. I guess you can manage now till
Monday,' and my confidence in Providence diffused such a genial warmth
through my steam-heated apartment that I forgot all about his overcoat.
I wish I could forget about it now.

We felt that we ought to say something to comfort a man who owned
his excess of beneficence. Oh, you mustn't mind giving him so much
money. We can't always remember our duty to cut the unfortunate as
close as we ought. Another time you will do better. Come! Cheer up!

Our friend did not seem entirely consoled by our amiability. In
fact, he seemed not to notice it. He heaved a great sigh in resuming:
He appeared to think I was hinting that it was time for him to go, for
he got up from the lounge where I had thoughtlessly had the decency to
make him sit down, and went out into the hall, thanking me as I
followed him to the door. I was sorry to let him go; he had interested
me somehow beyond anything particularly appealing in his personality;
in fact, his personality was rather null than otherwise, as far as that
asserted any claim; such a mere man and brother! Before he put his hand
on my door-knob a belated curiosity stirred in me, which I tried, as
delicately as I could, to appease. 'Was your trouble something about
the'I was going to say the ladies, but that seemed too mawkish, and I
boldly outed with'women?' 'Oh no,' he said, meekly; 'it was just
cloth, a piece of cloth,' 'Breaking and entering?' I led on. 'Well, not
exactly, butit came to grand larceny,' and I might have fancied a
touch of mounting self-respect in his confession of a considerable
offence.

I didn't know exactly what to say, so I let myself off with a
little philosophy: 'Well, you see, it didn't pay, exactly,' 'Oh no,' he
said, sadly enough, and he went out.

Our friend was silent at this point, and we felt that we ought to
improve the occasion in his behalf. Well, there you lost a great
opportunity. You ought to have rubbed it in. You ought to have made him
reflect upon the utter folly of his crime. You ought to have made him
realize that for a ridiculous value of forty, or fifty, or seventy-five
dollars, he had risked the loss of his liberty for two years, and not
only his liberty, but his labor, for he had come out of the
penitentiary after two years of hard work as destitute as he went in;
he had not even the piece of cloth to show for it all. Yes, you lost a
great opportunity.

Our friend rose from the dejected posture in which he had been
sitting, and blazed outwe have no milder word for itblazed out in a
sort of fiery torrent which made us recoil: Yes, I lost that great
opportunity, and I lost a greater still. I lost the opportunity of
telling that miserable man that, thief for thief, and robber for
robber, the State which had imprisoned him for two years, and then cast
him out again without a cent of pay for the wages he had been earning
all that dreadful time, was a worse thief and a worse robber than he! I
ought to have told him that in so far as he had been cheated of his
wages by the law he was the victim, the martyr of an atrocious survival
of barbarism. Oh, I have thought of it since with shame and sorrow! I
was sending him out into the cold that was gathering for the Baby
Blizzard without the hope of his overcoat, but since then I have
comforted myself by considering how small my crime was compared with
that of the State which had thrown him destitute upon the world after
the two years' labor it had stolen from him. At the lowest rate of
wages for unskilled labor, it owed him at least a thousand dollars, or,
with half subtracted for board and lodging, five hundred. It was his
delinquent debtor in that sum, and it had let him loose to prey upon
society in my person because it had defrauded him of the money he had
earned.

But, our dear friend! we entreated, don't you realize that this
theft, this robbery, this fraud, as you call it, was part of the
sanative punishment which the State had inflicted upon him?

And you don't think two years' prison, two years' slavery, was
sanative enough without the denial of his just compensation?

We perceived that it would be useless to argue with a man in this
truculent mood, and we silently forbore to urge that the vision of
destitution which the criminal must have before his eyes, advancing
hand in hand with liberty to meet him at the end of his term when his
prison gates opened into the world which would not feed, or shelter, or
clothe, or in any wise employ him, would be a powerful deterrent from
future crime, and act as one of the most efficient agencies of virtue
which the ingenuity of the law has ever invented. But our silence did
not wholly avail us, for our poor misguided friend went on to say:

Suppose he had a wife and childrenhe may have had several of
both, for all I knowdependent on him, would it have been particularly
sanative for them to be deprived of his earnings, too?

We cannot answer these sophistries, we were exasperated into
replying. All that we can say is that anything elseanything like
what you call justice to the criminal, the prisonerwould disrupt
society, and we felt that disrupt was a word which must carry
conviction to the densest understanding. It really appeared to do so in
this case, for our friend went away without more words, leaving behind
him a manuscript, which we mentally rejected, while seeing our way to
use the material in it for the present essay; it is the well-known
custom of editors to employ in this way the ideas of rejected
contributors.

A few days later we met our friend, and as we strolled beside him in
the maniacal hubbub of the New York streets, so favorable to
philosophic communion, we said, Well, have you met your namesake since
you came to his rescue against the robber State, or did he really sail
on the cattle-steamer, as he said he was going to do?

Our friend gave a vague, embarrassed laugh. He didn't sail,
exactly, at least not on that particular steamer. The fact is, I have
just parted from him at my own doorthe outside of it. It appears that
the authorities of that particular line wished to take advantage of him
by requiring him to pay down a sum of money as a guarantee of good
faith, and that he refused to do sonot having the money, for one
reason. I did not understand the situation exactly, but this was not
essential to his purpose, which made itself evident through a good deal
of irrelevant discourse. Since I had seen him, society had emulated the
State in the practice of a truly sanative attitude toward him. At the
place where he went to have his half-crown changed into American money
they would only give him forty cents for it, but he was afterward
assured by an acquaintance that the current rate was sixty cents. In
fact, a half-crown is worth a little more.

Well, what can you expect of money-changers? we returned,
consolingly. And what is going to become of your unhappy beneficiary
now?

Why, according to his report, fortune has smiled, or half-smiled,
as the novelists say, upon him. He has found a berth on another line of
cattle-steamers, where they don't require a deposit as a guarantee of
good faith. In fact, the head steward has taken a liking to him, and he
is going out as one of the table-stewards instead of one of the
herdsmen; I'm not sure that herdsmen is what they call them.

We laughed sardonically. And do you believe he is really going?

Our friend sighed heavily. Well, I don't believe he's coming back.
I only gave him the loose change I had in my pocket, and I don't think
it will support him so handsomely to the end of the week that he will
wish to call upon me for more.

We were both silent, just as the characters are in a novel till the
author can think what to make them say next. Then we asked, And you
still think he had been in the penitentiary?

I don't see why he should have said so if he wasn't.

Well, then, we retorted bitterly, again like a character in
fiction, you have lost another great opportunity: not a moral
opportunity this time, but an aesthetic opportunity. You could have got
him to tell you all about his life in prison, and perhaps his whole
career leading up to it, and you could have made something interesting
of it. You might have written a picaresque novel or a picaresque short
story, anyway.

Our friend allowed, with a mortified air, It was rather a break.

You threw away the chance of a lifetime. Namesakes who have been in
jail don't turn up every day. In his intimate relation to you, he would
have opened up, he would have poured out his whole heart to you. Think
of the material you have lost.

We thought of it ourselves, and with mounting exasperation. When we
reflected that he would probably have put it into his paper, and when
we reflected that we could have given so much more color to our essay,
we could not endure it. Well, good-day, we said, coldly; we are
going down this way.

Our friend shook hands, lingeringly, absently. Then he came to
himself with a mocking laugh. Well, perhaps he wasn't, after all, what
he said.

A Veteran Novelist, who was also an intimate friend of the Easy
Chair's, sat before his desk pensively supporting his cheek in his left
hand while his right toyed with the pen from which, for the moment at
least, fiction refused to flow. His great-niece, who seemed such a
contradiction in terms, being as little and vivid personally as she was
nominally large and stately, opened the door and advanced upon him.

Do I disturb you, uncle? she asked; she did not call him
great-uncle, because that, she rightly said, was ridiculous; and now,
as part of the informality, she went on without waiting for him to
answer, Because, you know, you wanted me to tell you what I thought of
your last story; and I've just read it.

Oh yes! the Veteran Novelist assented brightly, hiding his
struggle to recall which story it was. Well?

Well, she said, firmly but kindly, you want me to be frank with
you, don't you?

By all means, my dear. It's very good of you to read my story. By
this time, he had, with the help of the rather lean volume into which
his publishers had expanded a long-short story, and which she now held
intensely clasped to her breast, really remembered.

Not at all! she said. She sat down very elastically in the chair
on the other side of his desk, and as she talked she accented each of
her emotions by a spring from the cushioned seat. In the first place,
she said, with the effect of coming directly to business, I suppose
you know yourself that it couldn't be called virile.

No? he returned. What is virile?

Well, I can't explain, precisely; but it's something that all the
critics say of a book that is very strong, don't you know; and
masterful; and relentless; and makes you feel as if somebody had taken
you by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and seems to throw you
into the air, and trample you under foot.

Your being a gentleman has nothing to do with it, uncle! she said,
severely, for she thought she perceived a disposition in the Veteran
Novelist to shuffle. You can't be virile and at the same time remember
that you are a gentleman. Lots of women write virile books.

Ladies? the novelist asked.

Don't I say that has nothing to do with it? If you wish to grip the
reader's attention you must let yourself go, whether you're a gentleman
or a lady. Of course, she relented, your book's very idyllic, and
delightful, and all that; but, she resumed, severely, do you think an
honest critic could say there was not a dull page in it from cover to
cover?

The novelist sighed. I'm sure I don't know. They seem to say itin
the passages quoted in the advertisementsof all the books published.
Except mine, he added, sadly.

Yes, that is it. One can't say dull; but too easy-going. No
faithful critic could begin a notice of your book with such a passage
as: 'Have you read it? No? Then hop, skip, and jump, and get it. Don't
wait to find your hat or drink your coffee. March! It's going like the
wind, and you must kite if you want one of the first edition of fifty
thousand!' Now that, his great-niece ended, fondly, is what I should
like every critic to say of your book, uncle.

The Veteran Novelist reflected for a moment. Then he said, more
spiritedly, I don't believe I should, my dear.

Then you must; that's all. But that's a small thing. What I
really wonder at is that, with all your experience, you are not more of
a stylist.

Stylist?

Yes. I don't believe there's an epigram in your book from beginning
to end. That's the reason the critics don't quote any brilliant
sentences from it, and the publishers can't advertise it properly. It
makes me mad to find the girls repeating other authors' sayings, and I
never catch a word from a book of yours, though you've been writing
more than a century.

Not quite so long, my dear, I think; though very, very long. But
just what do you mean by style?

Well, you ought to say even the simplest things in a distinguished
way; and here, all through, I find you saying the most distinguished
things in the simplest way. But I won't worry you about things that are
not vital. I'll allow, for the sake of argument, that you can't have
virility if you remember that you are a gentleman even when you are
writing fiction. But you can have passion. Why don't
you?

Don't I? I thought

Not a speck of itnot a single speck! It's rather a delicate
point, and I don't exactly know how to put it, but, if you want me to
be frank, I must. She looked at her great-uncle, and he nodded
encouragement. I don't believe there's a single place where he crushes
her to his heart, or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. He kisses
her cheek once, but I don't call that anything. Why, in lots of the
books, nowadays, the girls themselves cling to the men in a close
embrace, or put their mouths tenderly to theirsWell, of course, it
sounds rather disgusting, but in your own earlier books, I'm sure
there's more of itof passion. Isn't there? Think!

The Veteran Novelist tried to think. To tell you the truth, my
dear, I can't remember. I hope there was, and there always will be,
love, and true love, in my novelsthe kind that sometimes ends in
happy marriage, but is always rather shy of showing itself off to the
reader in caresses of any kind. I think passion can be intimated, and
is better so than brutally stated. If you have a lot of hugging and
kissing

Uncle!

How are your lovers different from those poor things in the Park
that make you ashamed as you pass them?

The police ought to put a stop to it. They are perfectly
disgraceful!

And they ought to put a stop to it in the novels. It's not only
indecent, but it's highly insanitary. Nice people don't want you to
kiss their children, nowadays, and yet they expect us novelists to
supply them with passion of the most demonstrative sort in our fiction.
Among the Japanese, who are now one of the great world-powers, kissing
is quite unknown in real life. I don't know the Japanese fiction very
well, but I doubt whether there's a single kiss, or double, in it. I
believe that a novel full of intense passion could be written without
the help of one embrace from beginning to end.

Uncle! the girl vividly exclaimed, why don't you do it? It
would be the greatest success! Just give them the wink, somehow, at the
startjust hint that there was the greatest kind of passion going on
all the time and never once showing itself, and the girls would be
raving about it. Why don't you do it, uncle? You know I do so
want you, for once, to write the most popular book of the month!

I want to do it myself, my dear. But as to my writing a book full
of suppressed passion, that's a story in itself.

Tell it! she entreated.

The Easy Chair wouldn't give me room for it. But I'll tell you
something else. When I was a boy I had a knack at versing, which came
rather in anticipation of the subjects to use it on. I exhausted Spring
and Morning and Snow and Memory, and the whole range of mythological
topics, and then I had my knack lying idle. I observed that there was
one subject that the other poets found inexhaustible, but somehow I
felt myself disqualified for treating it. How could I sing of Love when
I had never been in love? For I didn't count those youthful affairs
when I was only in the Third Reader and the first part of the
Arithmetic. I went about trying to be in love, as a matter of business;
but I couldn't manage it. Suddenly it managed itself; and then I found
myself worse disqualified than ever. I didn't want to mention it;
either to myself or to her, much less to the world at large. It seemed
a little too personal.

Oh, uncle! How funny you are!

Do you think so? I didn't think it much fun then, and I don't now.
Once I didn't know what love was, and now I've forgotten!

No such thing, uncle! You write about it beautifully, even if
you're not very virile or epigrammatic or passionate. I won't let you
say so.

Well, then, my dear, if I haven't forgotten, I'm not interested.
You see, I know so much more about it than my lovers do. I can't take
their point of view any longer. To tell you the truth, I don't care a
rap whether they get married or not. In that story there, that you've
been reading, I got awfully tired of the girl. She was such a fool, and
the fellow was a perfect donkey.

But he was the dearest donkey in the world! I wanted to hshake
hands with him, and I wanted to kissyes, kiss!her, she was
such a lovable fool.

You're very kind to say so, my dear, but you can't keep on making
delightful idiots go down with the public. That was what I was thinking
when you came in and found me looking so dismal. I had stopped in the
middle of a most exciting scene because I had discovered that I was
poking fun at my lovers.

And here I, the girl lamented, didn't take the slightest notice,
but began on you with the harshest criticisms!

I didn't mind. I dare say it was for my good.

I'm sure I meant it so, uncle. And what are you going to do about
it?

Well, I must get a new point of view.

Yes?

I must change my ground altogether. I can't pretend any longer to
be the contemporary of my lovers, or to have the least sympathy with
their hopes and fears. If I were to be perfectly honest with them, I
should tell them, perhaps, that disappointed love was the best thing
that could happen to either of them, but, if they insisted on
happiness, that a good broken engagement promised more of it than
anything else I could think of.

That is true, the girl sighed. There are a great many unhappy
marriages. Of course, people would say it was rather
pessimistic, wouldn't they?

People will say anything. One mustn't mind them. But now I'll tell
you what I've been thinking all the time we've been talking.

Well? I knew you were not thinking of my nonsense!

It was very good nonsense, as nonsense goes, my dear. What I've
been thinking is that I must still have the love interest in my books,
and have it the main interest, but I must treat it from the
vantage-ground of age; it must be something I look back upon, and a
little down upon.

I see what you mean, the girl dissentingly assented.

I must be in the whole secretthe secret, not merely of my lovers'
love, but the secret of love itself. I must know, and I must subtly
intimate, that it doesn't really matter to anybody how their affair
turns out; for in a few years, twenty or thirty years, it's a thousand
to one that they won't care anything about it themselves. I must
maintain the attitude of the sage, dealing not unkindly but truthfully
with the situation.

It would be rather sad, the girl murmured. But one likes sad
things.

When one is young, one does; when one is old, one likes true
things. But, of course, my love-stories would be only for those who
have outlived love. I ought to be fair with my readers, and forewarn
them that my story was not for the young, the hopeful, the happy.

The girl jumped to her feet and stood magnificent. Uncle! It's
grand!

He rose, too. What is? he faltered.

The idea! Don't you see? You can have the publisher announce it as
a story for the disillusioned, the wretched, and the despairing, and
that would make every girl want it, for that's what every girl thinks
she is, and they would talk to the men about it, and then they
would want it, and it would be the book of the month! Don't say another
word. Oh, you dear! In spite of the insanitary nature of the action,
she caught her uncle round the neck, and kissed him on his bald spot,
and ran out of the room. She opened the door to call back: Don't lose
a single minute. Begin it now!

But the Veteran Novelist sank again into his chair in the posture in
which she had surprised him.

We lately received a publication which has interested us somewhat
out of proportion to its size. It is called The Way into Print,
but it does not treat, as the reader might rashly suppose, of the best
method of getting your name into the newspapers, either as a lady who
is giving a dinner to thirteen otherwise unknown persons, or is making
a coming-out tea for her debutante daughter, or had a box full of
expensively confectioned friends at the opera or the vaudeville, or is
going to read a paper at a woman's club, or is in any sort figuring in
the thousand and one modern phases of publicity; it does not even
advise her guests or hearers how to appear among those present, or
those who were invited and did not come, or those who would not have
come if they had been invited. Its scope is far more restricted, yet
its plane is infinitely higher, its reach incomparably further. The
Print which it proposes to lead the Way into is that print where the
elect, who were once few and are now many, are making the corridors of
time resound to their footsteps, as poets, essayists, humorists, or
other literary forms of immortality. Their procession, which from the
point of the impartial spectator has been looking more and more like a
cake-walk in these later years, is so increasingly the attraction of
young-eyed ambition that nothing interests a very large class of people
more than advice for the means of joining it, and it is this advice
which the publication in point supplies: supplies, we must say, with as
much good sense and good feeling as is consistent with an office which
does not seem so dignified as we could wish.

Inevitably the adviser must now and then stoop to the folly of the
aspirant, inevitably he must use that folly from time to time with
wholesome severity, but he does not feel himself equal to the work
unaided. Our sudden national expansion, through the irresistible force
of our imaginative work, into an intellectual world-power has thrust a
responsibility upon the veterans of a simpler time which they may not
shirk, and the author of The Way into Print calls upon them to
share his task. He is not satisfied with the interesting chapters
contributed by younger authors who are in the act of winning their
spurs, but he appeals to those established in the public recognition to
do their part in aiding us to hold our conquest through the instruction
and discipline of those who must take their places when they put their
armor off. He does this by means of a letter, almost an open letter,
addressed personally to each veteran by means of the substitution of
his typewritten name for that of some other veteran, but not
differenced in the terms of the ensuing appeal to his kindness or his
conscience. He puts himself upon a broad humanitarian ground, and asks
that the typewritten author, who, he assumes, is prominently before
the public, shall answer certain questions to which the appellant owns
that he has already received hundreds of replies.

By an odd mischance one of his half-open letters found its way to
the Easy Chair, and, although that judgment-seat felt relieved from the
sense of anything like a lonely prominence before the public by the
very multitude of those similarly consulted, it did not remain as Easy
as it would have liked under the erring attribution of prominence. Yet
to have refused to help in so good a work would not have been in its
nature, and it lost as little time as possible in summoning a real
author of prominence to consider the problems so baffling to a mere
editorial effigy; for, as we ought to explain, the de facto
editor is to be found in the Study next door, and never in the Easy
Chair. The author prominently before the public came at once, for that
kind of author has very little to do, and is only too happy to respond
to calls like that of the friend of rising authorship. Most of his time
is spent at symposiums, imagined by the Sunday editions of the
newspapers, to consider, decide the question whether fig-paste is truly
a health-food; or whether, in view of a recent colossal gift for
educational purposes, the product of the Standard Oil Company was the
midnight oil which Shakespeare had in mind when he spoke of the scholar
wasting it; or something of that kind. His mind is whetted to the
sharpest edge by its employment with these problems, and is in prime
condition for such simple practical inquiries as those proposed by the
letter we had received. But, of course, he put on an air of great
hurry, and spoke of the different poems, novels, essays, and sketches
which he had laid aside to oblige us, and begged us to get down to
business at once.

We wish nothing better than to do so, we said, to humor him, for
we know you are a very busy man, and we will not keep you a moment
longer than is absolutely necessary. Would you like to have all the
questions at once, or would you rather study them one after another?

He said he thought he could better give an undivided mind to each if
he had them one at a time, and so we began with the first:

'1. Would you advise the young story-writer to study the old
masters in literature or the stories in the current magazines, in order
to meet the demands of the current editors?'

Will you read that again? the author prominently before the public
demanded, but when we had read it a second time it seemed only to
plunge him deeper into despair. He clutched his revered head with both
hands, and but for an opportune baldness would probably have torn his
hair. He murmured, huskily, Do you think you have got it right?

We avoided the response Sure thing by an appropriate
circumlocution, and then he thundered back: How innatureis a young
writer to forecast the demands of current editors? If an editor is
worth his salthis Attic salthe does not know himself what he wants,
except by the eternal yearning of the editorial soul for something new
and good. If he has any other demands, he is not a current editor, he
is a stagnant editor. Is it possible that there is a superstition to
the contrary?

Apparently.

Then that would account for many things. But go on.

Go on yourself. You have not answered the question.

Oh, by all means, the author sardonically answered; if the
current editor has demands beyond freshness and goodness, let the young
writer avoid the masters in literature and study the stories in the
current magazines.

You are not treating the matter seriously, we expostulated.

Yes, I amseriously, sadly, even tragically. I could not have
imagined a condition of things so bad, even with the results all round
us. Let us have the second question of your correspondent.

Here it is: '2. Has the unknown writer an equal chance with the
well-known author, provided his work is up to the standard of the
latter's?'

Of the latter's?of the latter's?of the latter's? Our friend
whispered the phrase to himself before he groaned out: What a
frightful locution! Really, really, it is more than I can bear!

For the cause you ought to bear anything. What do you really
think?

Why, if the former's work is as good as the latter's, why isn't the
former's chance as good if the current editor's demands are for the
same kind in the former's case as in the latter's? If the latter's aim
is to meet the imaginary demands of the stagnant editor, then the
former's work ought to be as attractive as the latter's. Ha, ha, ha!

He laughed wildly, and in order to recall him to himself we read the
third question: '3. Which is the more acceptablea well-told story
with a weak plot, or a poorly told story with a strong plot?'

Oh, but that is a conundrum, pure and simple! the author
protested. It is a poor parody on the old End-man pleasantry, 'Would
you rather be as foolish as you look, or look as foolish as you are?'
You are making it up!

We assure you we are not. It is no more a conundrum than the
others. Come: question!

Well, in the first place, I should like to know what a plot is.
Something that has occurred to you primarily as an effect from your
experience or observation? Or something you have carpentered out of the
old stuff of your reading, with a wooden hero and heroine reciprocally
dying for each other, and a wooden villain trying to foil them?

You had better ask a current editor or a stagnant. Do you confess
yourself posed by this plain problem? Do you give it up?

For the present. Perhaps I may gather light from the next
question.

Then here it is: '4. What do you consider the primary weakness in
the average stories or verses of the old writers?

Oh, that is easy. The same as in the average stories and verses of
the younger writersabsence of mind.

Are you sure you are not shirking? Cannot you give a categorical
answersomething that will really help some younger writer to take the
place which you are now more or less fraudulently holding? The younger
writers will cheerfully allow that the trouble is absence of mind, but
what line of reading would you suggest which would turn this into
presence of mind?

There is none, except to have themselves newly ancestored. Presence
of mind as well as absence of mind is something derived; you cannot
acquire it.

We think you might be a little less sardonic. Now here is the next
problem: '5. What are the successful author's necessary qualifications
in the matters of natural ability, education, life as he sees it and
lives it, technical training, etc?'

This will be the death of me! the prominent author lamented.
Couldn't I skip that one?

It seems to cover some of the most important points. We do not
think your self-respect will allow you to skip it. At any rate, make an
effort to answer it.

Thus challenged, the prominent author pulled himself together. Oh,
he said, sadly, which of us knows whether he has natural ability or
not, and what is education, and what is life as one sees it, and what
is technical training? Do these poor young fellows think that one is
tall or short by taking thought? It is the same as that, it seems to
me; or if you prefer a mystical solution, I should say, if you have a
longing, from your earliest consciousness, to write poetry or fiction,
and cannot keep from doing it for any long time together, you are
possibly born with a gift for it. But this may be altogether a mistake;
it may be the effect of your early and incessant scribblings on the
minds of spectators wholly incompetent to judge of your abilities, such
as your fond parents. This must rather often happen if we can judge
from what nine-tenths of what is called literature is composed of. If
your longing to write is the real thing, or is not, still education
will not help or hinder you in doing it. No man was ever yet taught any
art. He may be taught a trade, and that is what most of the versing and
prosing is, I suppose. If you have the gift, you will technically train
yourself: that is, you will learn how to be simple and clear and
honest. Charm you will have got from your great-grandfather or
great-grandmother; and life, which is only another sort of school, will
not qualify you to depict life; but if you do not want to depict life,
you will perhaps be able to meet the demands of what our friend calls
the current editors.

Here the prominent author rose, but we stayed him with a gesture.
There is another question, the last: '6. Do you care to convey any
hints or suggestions gleaned from your personal experiences in the
climb to success that may make easier the gaining of the heights for
the beginner?

The prominent author roared with laughter. Read that again! But
when we had done so, he became grave, even sorrowful. Is it really
true, then, as we seem to see, that there is a large body of young
people taking up literature as a business? The thing that all my life I
have fondly dreamed was an art, dear and almost holy! Are they going
into it for the money there is in it? And am I, in my prominencemore
or less fraudulent, as you sayan incentive to them to persevere in
their enterprises? Is that what one has to come to after a life of
conscientious devotion toan ideal? Come, old friend, say it isn't so
bad as that! It is? Thenthe prominent author paused and sank weakly
into the chair from which he had risenperhaps I have been dreaming
all these years; but in my dream it seems to me that everything outside
of myself which seemed to hinder me has really helped me. There has
been no obstacle in my way which if I were at the bottom of the hill,
where I might very rightfully be, I would have removed. I am glad that
the climb to success, as your friend calls it, has been hard and long,
and I bless God for my difficulties and backsets, all of them.
Sometimes they seemed cruel; they filled me with despair and shame; but
there was not one that did not make me stronger and fitter for my work,
if I was fit for it. You know very well that in this art of ours we
need all the strength we can get from our overthrows. There is no
training that can ever make the true artist's work easy to him, and if
he is a true artist he will suspect everything easily done as ill done.
What comes hard and slow and hopelessly, that is the thing which when
we look at it we find is the thing that was worth doing. I had my downs
with my ups, and when I was beginning the downs outnumbered the ups ten
to one. For one manuscript accepted, and after the days of many years
printed, I had a dozen rejected and rejected without delay. But every
such rejection helped me. In some cases I had to swallow the bitter
dose and own that the editor was right; but the bitter was wholesome.
In other cases I knew that he was wrong, and then I set my teeth, and
took my courage in both hands, and tried and tried with that rejected
manuscript till the divinely appointed editor owned that I was right.
But these are the commonplaces of literary biography. I don't brag of
them; and I have always tried to keep my head in such shape that even
defeat has not swelled it beyond the No. 7 I began with. Why should I
be so wicked as to help another and a younger man over the bad places?
If I could only gain his confidence I should like to tell him that
these are the places that will strengthen his heart for the climb. But
if he has a weak heart, he had better try some other road. There! I
have given you all the 'hints and suggestions from my experience' that
I can think of, and now let me go.

Once more he rose, and once more we stayed him. Yes, we said, no
doubt you think you have spoken honestly and faithfully, but you have
addressed yourself to the wrong audience. You have spoken to artists,
born and self-made, but artists can always manage without help. Your
help was invoked in behalf of artisans, of adventurers, of speculators.
What was wanted of you was a formula for the fabrication of gold bricks
which would meet the demands of current dealers in that sort of wares.

But if I have never made gold bricks myself, or not knowingly?

Ah, that is what you say! But do you suppose anybody will believe
you?

The prominent author put on the hat which he flattered himself was a
No. 7, but which we could plainly see was a No. 12, and said, with an
air of patronizing compassion, You have sat here so long in your
cushioned comfort, looking out on the publishing world, that you have
become corrupt, cynical, pessimistic.

The talk at a dinner given by the Easy Chair to some of its most
valued friends was of the life after death, and it will not surprise
any experienced observer to learn that the talk went on amid much
unserious chatter, with laughing irrelevancies more appropriate to the
pouring of champagne, and the changing of plates, than to the very
solemn affair in hand. It may not really have been so very solemn.
Nobody at table took the topic much to heart apparently. The women,
some of them, affected an earnest attention, but were not uncheerful;
others frankly talked of other things; some, at the farther end of the
table, asked what a given speaker was saying; the men did not, in some
cases, conceal that they were bored.

No, the first speaker said, after weighing the pros and cons, for
my part, I don't desire it. When I am through, here, I don't ask to
begin again elsewhere.

And you don't expect to? his closest listener inquired.

And I don't expect to.

It is curious, the closest listener went on, how much our beliefs
are governed by our wishes in this matter. When we are young and are
still hungering for things to happen, we have a strong faith in
immortality. When we are older, and the whole round of things, except
death, has happened, we think it very likely we shall not live again.
It seems to be the same with peoples; the new peoples believe, the old
peoples doubt. It occurs to very, very few men to be convinced, as a
friend of mine has been convinced against the grain, of the reality of
the life after death. I will not say by what means he was convinced,
for that is not pertinent; but he was fully convinced, and he said to
me: 'Personally, I would rather not live again, but it seems that
people do. The facts are too many; the proofs I have had are
irresistible; and I have had to give way to them in spite of my wish to
reject them.'

Yes, the first speaker said, that is certainly an uncommon
experience. You think that if I were perfectly honest, I should envy
him his experience? Well, then, honestly, I don't.

No, the other rejoined, I don't know that I accuse your
sincerity. But, may I ask, what are your personal objections to
immortality?

It wouldn't be easy to say. If I could have had my way, I would not
have been at all. Speaking selfishly, as we always do when we speak
truly, I have not had a great deal of happiness, though I have had a
good deal of fun. But things seem to wear out. I like to laugh, and I
have laughed, in my time, consumedly. But I find that the laugh goes
out of the specific instances of laughability, just as grieving goes
out of grief. The thing that at the first and third time amused me
enormously leaves me sad at the fourth, or at least unmoved. You see, I
can't trust immortality to be permanently interesting. The reasonable
chances are that in the lapse of a few aeons I should find eternity
hanging heavy on my hands. But it isn't that, exactly, and it would be
hard to say what my objection to immortality exactly is. It would be
simpler to say what it really is. It is personal, temperamental,
congenital. I was born, I suspect, an indifferentist, as far as this
life is concerned, and as to another life, I have an acquired
antipathy.

That is curious, but not incredible, and of course not
inconceivable, the closest listener assented.

I'm not so sure of that, a light skirmisher broke his silence for
the first time. Do you mean to say, he asked of the first speaker,
that you would not mind being found dead in your bed to-morrow
morning, and that you would rather like it if that were actually the
end of you?

The first speaker nodded his head over the glass he had just
emptied, and having swallowed its contents hastily, replied,
Precisely.

Then you have already, at your age, evolved that 'instinct of
death,' which Metchnikoff, in his strange book, thinks the race will
come to when men begin living rightly, and go living on to a hundred
and fifty years or more, as they once did.

Who is Metchnikoff, and what is the name of his strange book? the
light skirmisher cut in.

He's the successor of Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute at Paris,
and his book is called The Nature of Man.

That blighting book! One of the women who had caught on to the
drift of the talk contributed this anguished suspiration.

Blighting? Is it blighting? the first speaker parleyed.

Don't you call it blighting, she returned, to be told not only
that you are the descendant of an anthropoid apewe had got used to
thatbut of an anthropoid ape gone wrong?

Sort of simian degenerate, the light skirmisher formulated the
case. We are merely apes in error.

The closest listener put this playfulness by. What seems to me a
fundamental error of that book is its constant implication of a
constant fear of death. I can very well imagine, or I can easily allow,
that we are badly made, and that there are all sorts of 'disharmonies,'
as Metchnikoff calls them, in us; but my own experience is that we are
not all the time thinking about death and dreading it, either in
earlier or later life, and that elderly people think less about it, if
anything, than younger people. His contention for an average life four
or five times longer than the present average life seems to be based
upon an obscure sense of the right of a man to satisfy that instinct of
life here on earth which science forbids him to believe he shall
satisfy hereafter.

Well, I suppose, the first speaker said, that Metchnikoff may err
in his premises through a temperamental 'disharmony' of Russian nature
rather than of less specific human nature. The great Russian authors
seem to recognize that perpetual dread of death in themselves and their
readers which we don't recognize in ourselves or our Occidental friends
and neighbors. Other people don't think of death so much as he
supposes, and when they do they don't dread it so much. But I think he
is still more interestingly wrong in supposing that the young are less
afraid of death than the old because they risk their lives more
readily. That is not from indifference to death, it is from
inexperience of life; they haven't learned yet the dangers which beset
it and the old have; that is all.

I don't know but you're right, the first speaker said. And I
couldn't see the logic of Metchnikoff's position in regard to the
'instinct of death' which he expects us to develop after we have lived,
say, a hundred and thirty or forty years, so that at a hundred and
fifty we shall be glad to go, and shall not want anything but death
after we die. The apparent line of his argument is that in youth we
have not the instinct of life so strongly but that we willingly risk
life. Then, until we live to a hundred and thirty or forty or so, we
have the instinct of life so strongly that we are anxious to shun
death; lastly the instinct of death grows in us and we are eager to lay
down life. I don't see how or why this should be. As a matter of fact,
children dread death far more than men who are not yet old enough to
have developed the instinct of it. Still, it's a fascinating and
suggestive book.

But not enough so to console us for the precious hope of living
again which it takes away so pitilessly, said the woman who had
followed the talk.

Is that such a very precious hope? the first speaker asked.

I know you pretend not, she said, but I don't believe you.

Then you think that the dying, who almost universally make a good
end, are buoyed up by that hope?

I don't see why they shouldn't be. I know it's the custom for
scientific people to say that the resignation of the dying is merely
part of the general sinking and so is just physical; but they can't
prove that. Else why should persons who are condemned to death be just
as much resigned to it as the sick and even more exalted?

Ah, the light skirmisher put in, some of the scientific people
dispose of that point very simply. They say it's self-hypnotism.

Well, but they can't prove that, either, she retorted. Then she
went on: Besides, the dying are not almost universally willing to die.
Sometimes they are very unwilling: and they seem to be unwilling
because they have no hope of living again. Why wouldn't it be just as
reasonable to suppose that we could evolve the instinct of death by
believing in the life hereafter as by living here a hundred and fifty
years? For the present, it's as easy to do the one as the other.

But not for the future, the first speaker said. As you suggest,
it may be just as reasonable to think we can evolve the instinct of
death by faith as by longevity, but it isn't as scientific.

What M. Metchnikoff wants is the scientific certaintywhich we can
have only by beginning to live a century and a half apiecethat the
coming man will not be afraid to die. This, of course, was from the
light skirmisher.

The woman contended, The coming man may be scientifically resigned
if he prefers, but the going man, the gone man, was rapturously
ready to die, in untold thousands of martyrdoms, because he believed
that he should live again.

The first speaker smiled compassionately, and perhaps also a little
patronizingly. I'm not sure that you have met the point exactly.
Metchnikoff denies, on the basis of scientific knowledge, that it is
possible for a man, being dead, to live again. In those two extremely
interesting chapters of his, which treat of the 'Religious Remedies'
and the 'Philosophical Remedies' for the 'disharmonies of the human
constitution,' he is quite as unsparing of the sages as of the saints.
The Christians and the Buddhists fare no worse than Plato and the
Stoics; the last are no less unscientific than the first in his view,
and no less fallacious. What he asks is not that we shall be resigned
or enraptured in view of death, but that we shall physically desire it
when we are tired of living, just as we physically desire sleep when we
are tired of waking.

And to that end, the light skirmisher said, he asks nothing but
that we shall live a hundred and fifty years.

No, he asks that we shall live such natural lives that we shall die
natural deaths, which are voluntary deaths. He contends that most of us
now die accidental and violent deaths.

The woman who had caught on demanded, Why does he think we could
live a century and a half?

From analogies in the lives of other animals and from the facts of
our constitution. He instances the remarkable cases of longevity
recorded in the Bible.

I think he's very inconsistent, his pursuer continued. The Bible
says men lived anywhere from a hundred to nine hundred years, and he
thinks it quite possible. The Bible says that men live after death, and
he thinks that's impossible.

Well, have you ever met a man who had lived after death? the first
speaker asked.

No. Have you ever met a man two hundred years old? If it comes to
undeniable proof there is far more proof of ghosts than of
bicentenarians.

Very well, then, I get out of it by saying that I don't believe in
either.

And leave Metchnikoff in the lurch! the light skirmisher
reproached him. You don't believe in the instinct of death! And I was
just going to begin living to a hundred and fifty and dying voluntarily
by leaving off cheese. Now I will take some of the Gorgonzola.

Everybody laughed but the first speaker and the woman who had caught
on; they both looked rather grave, and the closest listener left off
laughing soonest.

We can't be too grateful to science for its devotion to truth. But
isn't it possible for it to overlook one kind of truth in looking for
another? Isn't it imaginable that when a certain anthropoid ape went
wrong and blundered into a man, he also blundered into a soul, and as a
slight compensation for having involuntarily degenerated from his
anthropoid ancestor, came into the birthright of eternal life?

Ah, that's just where you're mistaken! the woman who had caught on
exclaimed. Science does nothing but imagine things!

Well, not quite, the light skirmisher mocked.

She persisted unheeding: First the suggestion from the mystical
somewherethe same where, probably, that music and pictures and
poetry come from; then the hypothesis; then the proof; then the
established fact. Established till some new scientist comes along and
knocks it over.

It would be very interesting if some one would proceed
hypothetically concerning the soul and its immortality, as the
scientific people do in their inquiries concerning the origin of man,
electricity, disease, and the rest.

Yes, the light skirmisher agreed. Why doesn't some fellow bet
himself that he has an undying soul and then go on to accumulate the
proofs? The others seemed now to have touched bottom in the
discussion, and he launched a random inquiry upon the general silence.
By-the-way, I wonder why women are so much more anxious to live again
than men, as a general thing.

Because they don't feel, one of them at table ventured, that they
have had a fair chance here.

Oh! I thought maybe they felt that they hadn't had their say.

Is it quite certain, the closest listener asked, that they are
more anxious to live again than men? He looked round at the ladies
present, and at first none of them answered; perhaps because they
feared the men would think them weak if they owned to a greater longing
than themselves for immortality.

Finally the woman who had caught on said: I don't know whether it's
so or not; and I don't think it matters. But I don't mind saying that I
long to live again; I am not ashamed of it. I don't think very much of
myself; but I'm interested in living. Thenshe dropped her voice a
littlethere are some I should like to see again. I have known
peoplecharactersnaturesthat I can't believe are wasted. And those
that were dear to us and that we have lost

She stopped, and the first speaker now looked at her with a
compassion unalloyed by patronage, and did not ask, as he might, What
has all that to do with it?

In fact, a sympathetic silence possessed the whole company. It was
broken at last by the closest listener's saying: After all, I don't
know that Metchnikoff's book is so very blighting. It's certainly a
very important book, and it produces a reaction which may be wholesome
or unwholesome as you choose to think. And no matter what we believe,
we must respect the honesty of the scientific attitude in regard to a
matter that has been too much abandoned to the emotions, perhaps. In
all seriousness I wish some scientific man would apply the scientific
method to finding out the soul, as youhe turned to the light
skirmishersuggest. Why shouldn't it be investigated?

Upon this invitation the light skirmisher tried to imagine some
psychological experiments which should bear a certain analogy to those
of the physicists, but he failed to keep the level of his suggestion.

As I said, the closest listener remarked, he produces a secondary
state of revolt which is desirable, for in that state we begin to
inquire not only where we stand, but where he stands.

And what is your conclusion as to his place in the inquiry?

That it isn't different from yours or mine, really. We all share
the illusion of the race from the beginning that somehow our opinion of
the matter affects its reality. I should distinguish so far as to say
that we think we believe, and he thinks he knows. For my own part, I
have the impression that he has helped my belief.

The light skirmisher made a desperate effort to retrieve himself:
Then a few more books like his would restore the age of faith.

A number of the Easy Chair's friends were sitting round the fire in
the library of a country-house. The room was large and full of a soft,
flattering light. The fire was freshly kindled, and flashed and
crackled with a young vivacity, letting its rays frolic over the
serried bindings on the shelves, the glazed pictures on the walls, the
cups of after-luncheon coffee in the hands of the people, and the tall
jugs and pots in the tray left standing on the library table. It was
summer, but a cold rain was falling forbiddingly without. No one else
could come, and no one could wish to go. The conditions all favored a
just self-esteem, and a sense of providential preference in the
accidental assemblage of those people at that time and place.

The talk was rather naturally, though not necessarily, of books, and
one of the people was noting that children seemed to like short stories
because their minds had not the strength to keep the facts of a whole
book. The effort tired them, and they gave it up, not because a book
did not interest them, but because it exhausted their little powers.
They were good for a leap, or a dash, or a short flight in literature,
even very high literature, but they had not really the force for
anything covering greater time and space.

Another declared this very suggestive, and declared it in such a way
that the whole company perceived he had something behind his words, and
besought him to say what he meant. He did so, as well as he could,
after protesting that it was not very novel, or if so, perhaps not very
important, and if it was important, perhaps it was not true. They said
they would take the chances; and then he said that it was merely a
notion which had occurred to him at the moment concerning the new
reading of the new reading public, whether it might not be all juvenile
literature, adapted in mature terms to people of physical adolescence
but of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble-minded
youth, but aesthetically and intellectually children, who might
presently grow into the power of enjoying and digesting food for men.
By-and-by they might gather fortitude for pleasure in real literature,
in fiction which should not be a travesty of the old fairy-tales, or
stories of adventures among giants and robbers and pirates, or fables
with human beings speaking from the motives and passions of animals. He
mentioned fiction, he said, because the new reading of the new reading
public seemed to be nearly altogether fiction.

All this had so much the effect of philosophical analysis that those
comfortable people were lulled into self-approving assent; and putting
themselves altogether apart from the new reading public, they begged
him to say what he meant. He answered that there was nothing more
phenomenal in the modern American life; and he paid a pretty tribute to
their ignorance in owning that he was not surprised they knew nothing
of that public. He promised that he would try to define it, and he
began by remarking that it seemed to be largely composed of the kind of
persons who at the theatre audibly interpret the action to one another.
The present company must have heard them?

His listeners again assented. Was the new reading public drawn from
the theatre-going, or more definitely speaking, the matinee class?

There was something odd, there, the philosopher returned. The
matinee class was as large as ever: larger; while the new reading
public, perfectly interchangeable with it in its intellectual pleasure
and experiences, had suddenly outnumbered it a thousandfold. The
popular novel and the popular play were so entirely of one fibre and
texture, and so easily convertible, that a new novel was scarcely in
every one's bread-trough before it was on the boards of all the
theatres. This led some to believe that we were experiencing a revival
of the drama, and that if we kept on having authors who sold half a
million copies we could not help having a Shakespeare by-and-by: he
must follow.

One of those listening asked, But how had these people begun so
instantaneously to form themselves into this new innumerable reading
public? If they were of that quality of mind which requires the
translation of an unmistakable meaning from the players to the
playgoers, they must find themselves helpless when grappling in
solitude with the sense of a book. Why did not they go increasingly to
the theatre instead of turning so overwhelmingly to the printed word?

The philosopher replied that they had not now begun to do this, but
only seemed to have begun, since there really was no beginning in
anything. The readers had always been in the immense majority, because
they could read anywhere, and they could see plays only in the cities
and towns. If the theatre were universal, undoubtedly they would prefer
plays, because a play makes far less draft upon the mental capacities
or energies than the silliest book; and what seemed their effort to
interpret it to one another might very well be the exchange of their
delight in it. The books they preferred were of the nature of poor
plays, full of easy things to understand, cheap, common incidents,
obvious motives, and vulgar passions, such as had been used a thousand
times over in literature. They were fitted for the new reading public
for this reason; the constant repetition of the same characters,
events, scenes, plots, gave their infantile minds the pleasure which
children find in having a story told over and over in exactly the same
terms. The new reading public would rebel against any variance, just as
children do.

The most of the company silently acquiesced, or at least were
silent, but one of them made the speaker observe that he had not told
them what this innumerable unreasoning multitude had read before the
present plague of handsome, empty, foolish duodecimos had infested
everybody's bread-trough.

The philosopher said the actual interior form of non-literary
literature was an effect of the thin spread of our literary culture,
and outwardly was the effect of the thick spread of our material
prosperity. The dollar-and-a-half novel of to-day was the dime novel of
yesterday in an avatar which left its essence unchanged. It was even
worse, for it was less sincerely and forcibly written, and it could not
be so quickly worn out and thrown away. Its beauty of paper, print, and
binding gave it a claim to regard which could not be ignored, and
established for it a sort of right to lie upon the table, and then
stand upon the shelf, where it seemed to relate itself to genuine
literature, and to be of the same race and lineage. As for this vast
new reading public, it was the vast old reading public with more means
in its pocket of satisfying its crude, childish taste. Its head was the
same empty head.

There was a sort of dreadful finality in this, and for a while no
one spoke. Then some one tried in vain to turn the subject, while the
philosopher smiled upon the desolation he had made; and then one of
that sex which when satisfied of the truth likes to have its sense of
satisfaction ache through the increase of conviction, asked him why
the English reading public, which must be so much more cultivated than
our new reading public, seemed to like the same sort of puerile effects
in works of imagination, the stirring incidents, the well-worn plots,
the primitive passions, and the robustious incentives. He owned the
fact, but he contended that the fact, though interesting, was not so
mysterious as it appeared at first sight. It could be explained that
the English had never taken the imagination very seriously, and that in
their dense, close civilization, packed tight with social, political,
and material interests, they asked of the imagination chiefly
excitement and amusement. They had not turned to it for edification or
instruction, for that thrill of solemn joy which comes of vital truth
profoundly seen and clearly shown. For this reason when all Europe
besides turned her face to the light, some decades ago, in the pages of
the great prose poets who made the age illustrious, England preferred
the smoky links and dancing camp-fires which had pleased her immature
fancy, and kept herself well in the twilight of the old ideal of
imagination as the mother of unrealities. There could be no doubt, the
philosopher thought, that the recrudescence which her best wits
recognized as the effects of this perversity, was the origin of the
preposterous fiction which we now feed to the new reading public, and
which we think must somehow be right because it was hers and is ours,
and has the sanction of race and tradition.

It was not, he continued, a thing to shed the tear of unavailing
regret for, though it was not a transitory phase, or a state of
transition, for the condition that now existed had always existed. The
new reading public was larger than ever before not merely because there
was a fresh demand for reading, but because more people were lettered
and moneyed and leisured, and did not know what otherwise to do with
themselves. It was quite simple, and the fact was less to be regretted
in itself than for an indirect result which might be feared from it. He
paused at this, in order to be asked what this result was, and being
promptly asked he went on.

It was, he said, the degradation of authorship as a calling, in the
popular regard. He owned that in the past authorship had enjoyed too
much honor in the reverence and affection of the world: not always,
indeed, but at certain times. As long as authors were the clients and
dependents of the great, they could not have been the objects of a
general interest or honor. They had then passed the stage when the
simple poet or story-teller was wont to

sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings,

to wondering and admiring circles of simple listeners, and they had
not yet come to that hour of authorship when it reverted to the
peasantry, now turned people, and threw itself upon the people's
generous acceptance and recognition for bread and fame. But when that
hour came, it brought with it the honor of a reverent and persistent
curiosity concerning literature and the literary life, which the
philosopher said he was afraid could not survive the actual
superabundance of authors and the transformation of the novelist into
the artisan. There seemed, he pursued, a fixed formula for the
manufacture of a work of fiction, to be studied and practised like any
other. Literature was degraded from an art to a poor sort of science,
in the practical application of which thousands were seen prospering;
for the immense output of our press represented the industry of
hundreds and thousands. A book was concocted, according to a patent
recipe, advertised, and sold like any other nostrum, and perhaps the
time was already here when it was no longer more creditable to be known
as the author of a popular novel than as the author of a popular
medicine, a Pain-killer, a Soothing Syrup, a Vegetable Compound, a
Horse Liniment, or a Germicide. Was it possible, he asked, for a reader
of the last book selling a hundred thousand copies to stand in the
loving or thrilling awe of the author that we used to feel for
Longfellow and Tennyson, for Emerson and Carlyle, for Hawthorne and
George Eliot, for Irving and Scott, or for any of their great elders or
youngers? He repeated that perhaps authorship had worked its
worshippers too hard, but there was no doubt that their worship was a
genuine devotion. For at least a hundred and fifty years it had been
eagerly offered in a full acceptance of the Schiller superstition that
at the sharing of the earth the poet, representing authorship, had been
so much preoccupied with higher things that he had left the fleshpots
and the loaves and fishes to others, and was to be compensated with a
share of the divine honors paid to Jove himself. From Goethe to
Carlyle, what a long roll of gods, demigods, and demisemigods it was!
It might have been bad for the deities, and the philosopher rather
thought it was, but burning incense on the different shrines was an
excellent thing for the votaries, and kept them out of all sorts of
mischiefs, low pleasures, and vain amusements. Whether that was really
so or not, the doubt remained whether authorship was not now a creed
outworn. Did tender maids and virtuous matrons still cherish the hope
of some day meeting their literary idols in the flesh? Did generous
youth aspire to see them merely at a distance, and did doting sires
teach their children that it was an epoch-making event when a great
poet or novelist visited the country; or when they passed afar, did
they whip some favored boy, as the father of Benvenuto Cellini whipped
him at sight of a salamander in the fire that he might not forget the
prodigy? Now that the earth had been divided over again, and the poet
in his actual guise of novelist had richly shared in its goods with the
farmer, the noble, the merchant, and the abbot, was it necessary or
even fair that he should be the guest of heaven? In other words, now
that every successful author could keep his automobile, did any one
want his autograph?

In the silence that fell upon the company at these words, the
ticking of the clock under its classic pediment on the mantel was
painfully audible, and had the effect of intimating that time now had
its innings and eternity was altogether out of it. Several minutes
seemed to pass before any one had the courage to ask whether the
degradation of authorship was not partially the result of the stand
taken by the naturalists in Zola, who scorned the name of art for his
calling and aspired to that of science. The hardy adventurer who
suggested this possibility said that it was difficult to imagine the
soul stirred to the same high passion by the botanist, the astronomer,
the geologist, the electrician, or even the entomologist as in former
times by the poet, the humorist, the novelist, or the playwright. If
the fictionist of whatever sort had succeeded in identifying himself
with the scientist, he must leave the enjoyment of divine honors to the
pianist, the farce-comedian, the portrait-painter, the emotional actor,
and the architect, who still deigned to practise an art.

The philosopher smiled, and owned that this was very interesting,
and opened up a fresh field of inquiry. The first question there was
whether the imaginative author were not rather to blame for not having
gone far enough in the scientific direction in the right scientific
fashion than for having taken that course at all. The famous reproach
of poetry made by Huxley, that it was mostly sensual caterwauling,
might well have given the singer pause in striking the sympathetic
catgut of his lyre: perhaps the strings were metallic; but no matter.
The reproach had a justice in it that must have stung, and made the
lyrist wish to be an atomic theorist at any cost. In fact, at that very
moment science had, as it were, caught the bread out of fiction's
mouth, and usurped the highest functions of imagination. In almost
every direction of its recent advance it had made believe that such and
such a thing was so, and then proceeded to prove it. To this method we
owed not only the possession of our present happy abundance of microbes
in every sort, but our knowledge of the universe in almost every
respect. Science no longer waited for the apple to fall before
inferring a law of gravitation, but went about with a stick knocking
fruit off every bough in the hope that something suggestive would come
of it. On make-believes of all kinds it based the edifices of all kinds
of eternal veracities. It behooved poetry, or fiction, which was
radically the same, to return to its earliest and simplest devices if
it would find itself in the embrace of science, and practise the
make-beliefs of its infancy. Out of so many there were chances of some
coming true if they were carried far enough and long enough. In fact,
the hypothetical method of science had apparently been used in the art
of advertising the works in which the appetite of the new reading
public was flattered. The publishers had hypothesized from the fact of
a population of seventy millions, the existence of an immense body of
raw, coarse minds, untouched by taste or intelligence, and boldly
addressed the new fiction to it. As in many suppositions of science
their guess proved true.

Then why, the hardy listener who had spoken before inquired, was not
make-believe the right method for the author, if it was the right
method for the scientist and the publisher? Why should not the novelist
hypothesize cases hitherto unknown to experience, and then go on by
persistent study to find them true? It seemed to this inquirer that the
mistake of fiction, when it refused longer to be called an art and
wished to be known as a science, was in taking up the obsolescent
scientific methods, and in accumulating facts, or human documents, and
deducing a case from them, instead of boldly supposing a case, as the
new science did, and then looking about for occurrences to verify it.

The philosopher said, Exactly; this was the very thing he was
contending for. The documents should be collected in support of the
hypothesis; the hypothesis should not be based on documents already
collected. First the inference, then the fact; was not that the new
scientific way? It looked like it; and it seemed as if the favorite
literature of the new reading public were quite in the spirit of the
new science. Its bold events, its prodigious characters, its incredible
motives, were not they quite of the nature of the fearless conjecture
which imagined long and short electric waves and then spread a mesh of
wire to intercept them and seize their message?

The hardy inquirer demanded: Then if so, why despise the literature
of the new reading public? Why despise the new reading public, anyway?

The philosopher responded that he despised nothing, not even a thing
so unphilosophical as modern science. He merely wished his interpellant
to observe again that the unification of the literary spirit and the
scientific spirit was degrading the literary man to the level of the
scientific man. He thought this was bad for the small remnant of
mankind, who in default of their former idolatry might take to the
worship of themselves. Now, however bad a writer might be, it was
always well for the reader to believe him better than himself. If we
had not been brought up in this superstition, what would have become of
the classics of all tongues? But for this, what was to prevent the
present company from making a clearance of three-fourths of the
surrounding shelves and feeding that dying flame on the hearth?

At this the host, who had been keeping himself in a modest abeyance,
came forward and put some sticks on the fire. He said he would like to
see any one touch his bindings; which seemed to be his notion of books.
Nobody minded him; but one of those dutyolators, who abound in a
certain sex, asked the philosopher what he thought we ought to do for
the maintenance of author-worship among us.

He answered, he had not thought of that; his mind had been fixed
upon the fact of its decay. But perhaps something could be done by
looking up the author whose book had sold least during the season, and
asking him candidly whether he would not like to be paid the divine
honors now going begging from one big seller to another; for the decay
of author-worship must be as much from the indifference of the authors
as from the irreverence of the readers. If such a low-selling author
did not seem to regard it as rather invidious, then pay him the divine
honors; it might be a wholesome and stimulating example; but perhaps we
should afterward have the demigod on our hands. Something might be
safelier done by writing, as with the present company, and inquiring
into the present condition of polite learning. This would keep the
sacred flame alive, and give us the comfort of refined association in
an exquisite moment of joy from the sense of our superiority to other
people. That, after all, was the great thing.

The company drew a little closer round the fire. The rain beat upon
the panes, and the wind swept the wet leaves against them, while each
exhaled a sigh of aspiration not unmixed with a soft regret.

The talk round the Easy Chair one day was of that strange passion
for reading which has of late possessed the public, and the contagion
or infection by which it has passed to hundreds of thousands who never
read before; and then the talk was of how this prodigious force might
be controlled and turned in the right way: not suffered to run to waste
like water over the dam, but directed into channels pouring upon wheels
that turn the mills of the gods or something like that. There were, of
course, a great many words; in fact, talk is composed of words, and the
people at that luncheon were there for talking as well as eating, and
they did not mind how many words they used. But the sum of their words
was the hope, after a due season of despair, that the present passion
for reading might be made to eventuate in more civilization than it
seemed to be doing, if it could be brought back to good literature,
supposing it was ever there in great strength, and the question was how
to do this.

One of the company said he had lately been reading a good many books
of Leigh Hunt's, and after everybody had interrupted with Delightful!
Perfectly charming! and the like, he went on to observe that one of
the chief merits of Hunt seemed to be his aptness in quotation. That,
he remarked, was almost a lost art with critics, who had got to
thinking that they could tell better what an author was than the author
himself could. Like every other power disused, the power of apt
quotation had died, and there were very few critics now who knew how to
quote: not one knew, as Hunt, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or the least of the
great quotational school of critics, knew. These had perhaps overworked
their gift, and might have been justly accused, as they certainly were
accused, of misleading the reader and making him think that the poets,
whose best they quoted, putting the finest lines in italics so that
they could not be missed, were as good throughout as in the passages
given. It was this sense of having abused innocence, or ignorance,
which led to the present reaction in criticism no doubt, and yet the
present reaction was an error. Suppose that the poets whose best was
given by quotation were not altogether as good as that? The critics
never pretended they were; they were merely showing how very good these
poets could be, and at the same time offering a delicate pleasure to
the reader, who could not complain that his digestion was overtaxed by
the choice morsels. If his pleasure in them prompted him to go to the
entire poet quoted, in the hope of rioting gluttonously upon him, the
reader was rightly served in one sense. In another, he was certainly
not misserved or his time wasted. It would be hard for him to prove
that he could have employed it more profitably.

Everybody, more or less, now sat up, and he who had the eye and ear
of the table went on to remark that he had not meant to make a defence
of the extinct school of quotational criticism. What he really meant to
do was to suggest a way out of the present situation in which the new
multitude of voracious readers were grossly feeding upon such
intellectual husks as swine would not eat, and imagining themselves
nourished by their fodder. There might be some person present who could
improve upon his suggestion, but his notion, as he conceived it, was
that something might be done in the line of quotational criticism to
restore the great poets to the public favor, for he understood that
good authors were now proportionately less read than they once were. He
thought that a pity: and the rest of the company joined in asking him
how he proposed to employ the quotational method for his purpose.

In answering he said that he would not go outside of the English
classics, and he would, for the present, deal only with the greatest of
these. He took it for granted that those listening were all agreed that
mankind would be advantaged in their minds or manners by a more or less
familiar acquaintance with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,
Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
Keats, Tennyson, and Browning; he himself did not mind adding Scott to
the list, whose poetry he found much better than his prose. To bring
about an acquaintance which might very profitably ripen into intimacy,
he would have each of these poets treated in the whole measure of his
work as many or most of them had been topically or partially treated by
the quotational critics. Some one here made him observe that he was
laying out rather a large piece of work, and to this he answered, Not
at all; the work had been already done. Asked then, somewhat
derisively, why it need be done over again, he explained, with a
modesty and patience which restored him to the regard he had lost by
the derision (all had impartially united in it), that though the work
had already been done, there needed some slight additions to it which
would easily fit it to his purpose. He was not thinking of going in for
one of those dreadful series of books which seemed the dismay alike of
publisher and reader, and required rewriting of matter more than enough
rewritten. In fact, he said, that for his purpose the writing was done
fully and probably better than it could be done again, and it was only
the reading and quoting that demanded editorial attention.

Another said he did not see how that could be, and the inventor of
the brave scheme, which was still in petto, said that he would
try to show him. We had, he contended, only too great riches in the
criticisms of the poets open to our choice, but suppose we took Spenser
and let Lowell introduce him to us. There would be needed a very brief
biographical note, and then some able hand to intersperse the criticism
with passages from Spenser, or with amplifications of the existing
quotations, such as would give a full notion of the poet's scope and
quality. The story of each of his poems could be given in a few words,
where the poems themselves could not be given even in part, and with
the constant help of the critic the reader could be possessed of a
luminous idea of the poet, such as he probably could not get by going
to him direct, though this was not to be deprecated, but encouraged,
after the preparatory acquaintance. The explanatory and illustrative
passages could be interpolated in the text of the criticism without
interrupting the critic, and something for Spenser might thus be done
on the scale of what Addison did for Milton. It was known how those
successive papers in the Spectator had rehabilitated one of the
greatest English poets, or, rather, rehabilitated the English public,
and restored the poet and the public to each other. They formed almost
an ideal body of criticism, and if they did not embody all that the
reader need know of Milton, they embodied so much that he could no
longer feel himself ignorant of Milton. In fact, they possessed him of
a high degree of Miltonian culture, which was what one wanted to have
with respect to any poet. They might be extended with still greater
quotation, and if something more yet were needed the essay on Milton
which made Macaulay's reputation might be employed as a vessel to catch
the overrunnings of the precious ichor.

Who could not wish to know the poetry of Keats as we already knew
his life through the matchless essay of Lowell? That might be filled
out with the most striking passages of his poetry, simply let in at
appropriate places, without breaking the flow of that high discourse,
and forming a rich accompaniment which could leave no reader
unpleasured or uninstructed. The passages given from the poet need not
be relevant to the text of the critic; they might be quite irrelevant
and serve the imaginable end still better. For instance, some passages
might be given in the teeth of the critic, and made to gainsay what he
had been saying. This would probably send the reader, if he was very
much perplexed, to the poet himself, which was the imaginable end. He
might be disappointed one way or he might be disappointed the other
way, but in the mean while he would have passed his time, and he would
have instructed if he had not amused himself.

It would be very interesting to take such a criticism as that of
Lowell on Dryden and give not only the fine things from him, but the
things that counted for the critic in his interesting contention that
Dryden failed of being a prime poet because of the great weight of
prose in him, and very good prose; or, as the critic charmingly put it,
he had wings that helped him run along the ground, but did not enable
him to fly. It would be most valuable for us to see how Dryden was a
great literary man, but not one of the greatest poets, and yet must be
ranked as a great poet. If the balance inclined now toward this
opinion, and now against it, very possibly the reader would find
himself impelled to turn to the poet's work, and again the imaginable
end would be served.

A listener here asked why the talker went chiefly to Lowell for the
illustration of his theory, and was frankly answered, For the same
reason that he had first alluded to Leigh Hunt: because he had lately
been reading him. It was not because he had not read any other
criticism, or not that he entirely admired Lowell's; in fact, he often
found fault with that. Lowell was too much a poet to be a perfect
critic. He was no more the greatest sort of critic than Dryden was the
greatest sort of poet. To turn his figure round, he had wings that
lifted him into the air when he ought to be running along the ground.

The company laughed civilly at this piece of luck, and then they
asked, civilly still, if Leigh Hunt had not done for a great many poets
just what he was proposing to have done. What about the treatment of
the poets and the quotations from them in the volumes on Wit and
Humor, Imagination and Fancy, A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and the rest? The talker owned that there was a great deal about these
which was to his purpose, but, upon the whole, the criticism was too
desultory and fragmentary, and the quotation was illustrative rather
than representative, and so far it was illusory. He had a notion that
Hunt's stories from the Italian poets were rather more in the line he
would have followed, but he had not read these since he was a boy, and
he was not prepared to answer for them.

One of the company said that she had read those Italian poets in
Leigh Hunt's version of them when she was a girl, and it had had the
effect of making her think she had read the poets themselves, and she
had not since read directly Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, or Tasso. She
regarded that as an irreparable injury, and she doubted whether, if the
great English poets could be introduced in that manner, very many
people would pursue their acquaintance for themselves. They would think
they were familiar with them already.

Yes, the talker assented, if that were the scheme, but it was not;
or, at least, it was only part of the scheme. The scheme was to give
the ever-increasing multitude of readers a chance to know something of
the best literature. If they chose to pursue the acquaintance, very
good; if they chose not to pursue the acquaintance, still very good;
they could not have made it at all without being somewhat refined and
enlightened. He felt very much about it as he felt about seeing Europe,
which some people left unseen because they could not give all the time
to it they would like. He always said to such people, Go if they could
only be gone a month. A day in Rome, or London, or Paris, was a
treasure such as a lifetime at home could not lay up; an hour of Venice
or Florence was precious; a moment of Milan or Verona, of Siena or
Mantua, was beyond price. So you could not know a great poet so little
as not to be enriched by him. A look from a beautiful woman, or a witty
word from a wise one, distinguished and embellished the life into which
it fell, so that it could never afterward be so common as it was
before.

Why, it was asked from a silence in which all the ladies tried to
think whether the speaker had her in mind or not, and whether he ought
really to be so personal, why could not Mr. Morley's English Men of
Letters series be used to carry out the scheme proposed; and its
proposer said he had nothing to say against that, except perhaps that
the frames might be too much for the pictures. He would rather choose a
critical essay, as he had intimated, for the frame of each picture; in
this sort of thing we had an endless choice, both new and old. If he
had any preference it would be for the older-fashioned critics, like
Hazlitt or perhaps like De Quincey; he was not sure, speaking without
the book, whether De Quincey treated authors so much as topics, but he
had the sense of wonderful things in him about the eighteenth-century
poets: things that made you think you knew them, and that yet made you
burn to be on the same intimate terms with them as De Quincey himself.

His method of knowing the poets through the critics, the sympathetic
critics, who were the only real critics, would have the advantage of
acquainting the reader with the critics as well as the poets. The
critics got a good deal of ingratitude from the reader generally, and
perhaps in their character of mere reviewers they got no more than they
merited, but in their friendly function of ushers to the good things,
even the best things, in the authors they were studying, they had a
claim upon him which he could not requite too generously. They acted
the part of real friends, and in the high company where the reader
found himself strange and alone, they hospitably made him at home.
Above all other kinds of writers, they made one feel that he was
uttering the good things they said. Of course, for the young reader,
there was the danger of his continuing always to think their thoughts
in their terms, but there were also great chances that he would begin
by-and-by to think his own thoughts in terms of his own.

The more quotational the critics were, the better. For himself the
speaker said that he liked that old custom of printing the very finest
things in italics when it came to citing corroborative passages. It had
not only the charm of the rococo, the pathos of a bygone fashion, but
it was of the greatest use. No one is the worse for having a great
beauty pointed out in the author one is reading or reading from.
Sometimes one does not see the given beauty at first, and then he has
the pleasure of puzzling it out; sometimes he never sees it, and then
his life is sublimed with an insoluble conundrum. Sometimes, still, he
sees what the critic means, and disagrees with him. In this case he is
not likely to go to the end of his journey without finding a critic
whom he agrees with about the passage in question.

After all, however, it was asked by one that had not spoken before
(with that fine air of saying a novel thing which people put on who
have not spoken before), would not the superficial knowledge of the
poets imparted by quotational criticism result in a sort of
pseudo-culture which would be rather worse than nothing, a kind of
intellectual plated ware or aesthetic near-silk?

The talker said he thought not, and that he had already touched upon
some such point in what he had said about going to Europe for a few
months. He offered the opinion that there was no such thing as
pseudo-culture; there was culture or there was not; and the reader of a
quotational criticism, if he enjoyed the quotations, became, so far,
cultivated. It could not be said that he knew the poets treated of, but
neither could it be said that he was quite ignorant of them. As a
matter of fact, he did know them in a fashion, through a mind larger
and clearer than his own.

For this reason the talker favored the reading of criticism,
especially the kind of criticism that quoted. He would even go so far
as to say that there was no just and honest criticism without
quotation. The critic was bound to make out his case, or else abdicate
his function, and he could not make out his case, either for or against
an author, without calling him to testify. Therefore, he was in favor
of quotational criticism, for fairness' sake, as well as for his
pleasure; and it was for the extension of it that he now contended. He
was not sure that he wished to send the reader to the authors quoted in
all cases. The reader could get through the passages cited a pretty
good notion of the authors' quality, and as for their quantity, that
was often made up of commonplaces or worse. In the case of the old
poets, and most of the English classics, there was a great deal of
filth which the reader would be better for not taking into his mind and
which the most copiously quotational critics would hardly offer him. If
any one said that without the filth one could not get a fair idea of
those authors, he should be disposed to distinguish, and to say that
without the filth one could not get a fair idea of their age, but of
themselves, yes. Their beauty and their greatness were personal to
them; even their dulness might be so; but their foulness was what had
come off on them from living at periods when manners were foul.

A young girl (much respected by the Easy Chair) who had always had
the real good of her grandfather at heart, wished to make him a
Christmas present befitting his years and agreeable to his tastes. She
thought, only to dismiss them for their banality, of a box of the
finest cigars, of a soft flannel dressing-gown, a bath robe of Turkish
towelling embroidered by herself, of a velvet jacket, and of a pair of
house shoes. She decided against some of these things because he did
not smoke, because he never took off his walking coat and shoes till he
went to bed, and because he had an old bath robe made him by her
grandmother, very short and very scant (according to her notion at the
chance moments when she had surprised him in it), from which neither
love nor money could part him; the others she rejected for the reason
already assigned. Little or nothing remained, then, but to give him
books, and she was glad that she was forced to this conclusion because,
when she reflected, she realized that his reading seemed to be very
much neglected, or at least without any lift of imagination or any
quality of modernity in it. As far as she had observed, he read the
same old things over and over again, and did not know at all what was
now going on in the great world of literature. She herself was a famous
reader, and an authority about books with other girls, and with the
young men who asked her across the afternoon tea-cups whether she had
seen this or that new book, and scrabbled round, in choosing between
cream and lemon, to hide the fact that they had not seen it themselves.
She was therefore exactly the person to select a little library of the
latest reading for an old gentleman who was so behind the times as her
grandfather; but before she plunged into the mad vortex of new
publications she thought she would delicately find out his preferences,
or if he had none, would try to inspire him with a curiosity concerning
these or those new books.

Now, grandfather, she began, you know I always give you a
Christmas present.

Yes, my dear, the old gentleman patiently assented, I know you
do. You are very thoughtful.

Not at all. If there is anything I hate, it is being thoughtful.
What I like is being spontaneous.

Well, then, my dear, I don't mind saying you are very spontaneous.

And I detest surprises. If any one wishes to make a lasting enemy
of me, let him surprise me. So I am going to tell you now what I am
going to give you. Do you like that?

I like everything you do, my child.

Well, this time you will like it better than ever. I am going to
give you books. And in order not to disappoint you by giving you books
that you have read before, I want to catechise you a little. Shall you
mind it?

Oh no, but I'm afraid you won't find me very frank.

I shall make you be. If you are not frank, there is no fun in not
surprising you, or in not giving you books that you have read.

There is something in that, her grandfather assented. But now,
instead of finding out what I have read, or what I like, why not tell
me what I ought to read and to like? I think I have seen a vast deal of
advice to girls about their reading: why shouldn't the girls turn the
tables and advise their elders? I often feel the need of advice from
girls on all sorts of subjects, and you would find me very grateful, I
believe.

The girl's eyes sparkled and then softened toward this docile
ancestor. Do you really mean it, grandfather? It would be fun if you
did.

But I should want it to be serious, my dear. I should be glad if
your good counsel could include the whole conduct of life, for I am
sensible sometimes of a tendency to be silly and wicked, which I am
sure you could help me to combat.

Well, admit for the sake of argument that it isn't. My difficulty
in regard to reading remains, and there you certainly could help me. At
moments it seems to me that I have come to the end of my line.

The old gentleman's voice fell, and she could no longer suspect him
of joking. So she began, Why, what have you been reading last?

Well, my dear, I have been looking into the Spectator a
little.

The London Spectator? Jim says they have it at the club, and
he swears by it. But I mean, what books; and that's a weekly newspaper,
or a kind of review, isn't it?

The Spectator I mean was a London newspaper, and it was a
kind of review, but it was a daily. Is it possible that you've never
heard of it? The young girl shook her head thoughtfully, regretfully,
but upon the whole not anxiously; she was not afraid that any important
thing in literature had escaped her. But you've heard of Addison, and
Steele, and Pope, and Swift?

Oh yes, we had them at school, when we were reading Henry Esmond
; they all came into that. And I remember, now: Colonel Esmond wrote a
number of the Spectator for a surprise to Beatrix; but I thought
it was all a make-up.

And you don't know about Sir Roger de Coverley?

Of course I do! It's what the English call the Virginia Reel. But
why do you ask? I thought we were talking about your reading. I don't
see how you could get an old file of a daily newspaper, but if it
amuses you! Is it so amusing?

It's charming, but after one has read it as often as I have one
begins to know it a little too well.

Yes; and what else have you been reading?

Well, Leigh Hunt a little lately. He continues the old essayist
tradition, and he is gently delightful.

Never heard of him! the girl frankly declared.

He was a poet, too, and he wrote the Story of Riminiabout
Paolo and Francesca, you know.

Oh, there you're away off, grandfather! Mr. Philips wrote about
them; and that horrid D'Annunzio. Why, Duse gave D'Annunzio's play
last winter! What are you thinking of?

Perhaps I am wandering a little, the grandfather meekly submitted,
and the girl had to make him go on.

Do you read poetry a great deal? she asked, and she thought if his
taste was mainly for poetry, it would simplify the difficulty of
choosing the books for her present.

Well, I'm rather returning to it. I've been looking into Crabbe of
late, and I have found him full of a quaint charm.

Crabbe? I never heard of him! she owned as boldly as before, for
if he had been worth hearing of, she knew that she would have heard of
him. Don't you like Kipling?

Yes, when he is not noisy. I think I prefer William Watson among
your very modern moderns.

Why, is he living yet? I thought he wrote ten or fifteen
years ago! You don't call him modern! You like Stevenson, don't
you? He's a great stylist; everybody says he is, and so is George
Meredith. You must like him?

He's a great intellect, but a little of him goes almost as long a
way as a little of Browning. I think I prefer Henry James.

Oh yes, he's just coming up. He's the one that has distinction. But
the people who write like him are a great deal more popular.
They have all his distinction, and they don't tax your mind so much.
But don't let's get off on novelists or there's no end to it. Who are
really your favorite poets?

Well, I read Shakespeare rather often, and I read Dante by fits and
starts; and I do not mind Milton from time to time. I like Wordsworth,
and I like Keats a great deal better; every now and then I take up
Cowper with pleasure, and I have found myself going back to Pope with
real relish. And Byron; yes, Byron! But I shouldn't advise your reading
Don Juan.

That's an opera, isn't it? What they call 'Don Giovanni.' I never
heard of any such poem.

That shows how careful you have been of your reading.

Oh, we read everything nowadaysif it's up to date; and if Don
Juan had been, you may be sure I would have heard of it. I suppose
you like Tennyson, and Longfellow, and Emerson, and those old
poets?

Are they old? They used to be so new! Yes, I like them, and I like
Whittier and some things of Bryant's.

At the last two names the girl looked vague, but she said: Oh yes,
I suppose so. And I suppose you like the old dramatists?

Some of themMarlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher: a few of their
plays. But I can't stand most of the Elizabethans; I can't stand Ben
Jonson at all.

Oh yes'Rasselas.' I can't stand him either, grandfather. I'm
quite with you about Ben Jonson. 'Too much Johnson,' you know.

The grandfather looked rather blank. Too different Johnsons,
I think, my dear. But perhaps you didn't mean the Elizabethans; perhaps
you mean the dramatists of the other Johnson's time. Well, I like
Sheridan pretty well, though his wit strikes me as mechanical, and I
really prefer Goldsmith; in his case, I prefer his Vicar of
Wakefield, and his poems to his plays. Plays are not very easy
reading, unless they are the very best. Shakespeare's are the only
plays that one wants to read.

The young girl held up her charming chin, with the air of keeping it
above water too deep for her. And Ibsen? she suggested. I hope you
despise Ibsen as much as I do. He's clear gone out now, thank goodness!
Don't you think Ghosts was horrid?

It's dreadful, my dear; but I shouldn't say it was horrid. No, I
don't despise Ibsen; and I have found Mr. Pinero's plays good reading.

Oh, the girl said, getting her foot on the ground. 'The Gay Lord
Quex'; Miss Vanbrugh was great in that. But now don't get off on
the theatre, grandfather, or there will be no end to it. Which of the
old, old poetsbefore Burns or Shelley evendo you like?

Well, when I was a boy, I read Chaucer, and liked him very much;
and the other day when I was looking over Leigh Hunt's essays, I found
a number of them about Chaucer with long, well-chosen extracts; and I
don't know when I've found greater pleasure in poetry. If I must have a
favorite among the old poets, I will take Chaucer. Of course, Spenser
is rather more modern.

Yes, but I can't bear his agnosticism, can you? And I hate
metaphysics, anyway.

The grandfather looked bewildered; then he said, Now, I'm afraid we
are getting too much Spenser.

The girl went off at a tangent. Don't you just love Mr.
Gillette in 'Sherlock Holmes'? There's a play I should think you would
like to read! They say there's a novel been made out of it. I wish I
could get hold of it for you. Well, go on, grandfather!

No, my dear, it's for you to go on. But don't you think you've
catechised me sufficiently about my reading? You must find it very
old-fashioned.

No, not at all. I like old things myself. The girls are always
laughing at me because I read George Eliot, and Dickens, and Thackeray,
and Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, and those back numbers. But I
should say, if I said anything, that you were rather deficient in
fiction, grandfather. You seem to have read everything but novels.

Is that so? I was afraid I had read nothing but novels. I

Tell me what novels you have read, she broke in upon him
imperatively. The ones you consider the greatest.

The grandfather had to think. It is rather a long listso long
that I'm ashamed of it. Perhaps I'd better mention only the very
greatest, like Don Quixote, and Gil Blas, and Wilhelm
Meister, and The Vicar of Wakefield, and Clarissa Harlowe, and Emma, and Pride and Prejudice, and The Bride of
Lammermoor, and I Promessi Sposi, and Belinda, and
Frankenstein, and Chartreuse de Parme, and Cesar
Birotteau, and The Last Days of Pompeii, and David
Copperfield, and Pendennis, and The Scarlet Letter,
and Blithedale Romance, and The Cloister and the Hearth,
and Middlemarch, and Smoke, and Fathers and Sons,
and A Nest of Nobles, and War and Peace, and Anna
Karenina, and Resurrection, and Dona Perfecta, and
Marta y Maria, and I Malavoglia, and The Return of the
Native, and L'Assomoir, and Madame Bovary, and The
Awkward Age, and The Grandissimesand most of the other
books of the same authors. Of course, I've read many more perhaps as
great as these, that I can't think of at the moment.

The young girl listened, in a vain effort to follow her agile
ancestor in and out of the labyrinths of his favorite fiction, most of
which she did not recognize by the names he gave and some of which she
believed to be very shocking, in a vague association of it with deeply
moralized, denunciatory criticisms which she had read of the books or
the authors. Upon the whole, she was rather pained by the confession
which his reading formed for her grandfather, and she felt more than
ever the necessity of undertaking his education, or at least his
reform, in respect to it. She was glad now that she had decided to give
him books for a Christmas present, for there was no time like Christmas
for good resolutions, and if her grandfather was ever going to turn
over a new leaf, this was the very hour to help him do it.

She smiled very sweetly upon him, so as not to alarm him too much,
and said she had never been so much interested as in knowing what books
he really liked. But as he had read all those he named

Oh, dozens of times! he broke in.

Then perhaps he would leave it to her to choose an entirely new
list for him, so that he could have something freshly entertaining; she
did not like to say more edifying for fear of hurting his feelings, and
taking his silence for consent she went up and kissed him on his bald
head and ran away to take the matter under immediate advisement. Her
notion then was to look over several lists of the world's best hundred
books which she had been keeping by her, but when she came to compare
them, she found that they contained most of the books he had mentioned,
besides many others. It would never do to give him any one of these
libraries of the best hundred books for this reason, and for the reason
that a hundred books would cost more of her grandfather's money than
she felt justified in spending on him at a season when she had to make
so many other presents.

Just when she was at her wit's end, a sudden inspiration seized her.
She pinned on her hat, and put on her new winter jacket, and went out
and bought the last number of The Bookworm. At the end of this
periodical she had often got suggestions for her own reading, and she
was sure that she should find there the means of helping her poor
grandfather to a better taste in literature than he seemed to have. So
she took the different letters from Chicago, San Francisco, Denver,
Cincinnati, New Orleans, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia, and
up-town and down-town in New York, giving the best-selling books of the
month in all those places, and compiled an eclectic list from them,
which she gave to her bookseller with orders to get them as nearly of
the same sizes and colors as possible. He followed her instructions
with a great deal of taste and allowed her twenty-five per cent. off,
which she applied toward a wedding-present she would have to give
shortly. In this way she was able to provide her grandfather for the
new year with reading that everybody was talking about, and that
brought him up to date with a round turn.

Among the many letters which the Easy Chair has received after its
conference on the state of poetry, one of most decided note was from a
writer confessing herself of the contrary-minded. I love some
children, but not childhood in general merely because it is childhood.
So I love some poems rather than poetry in general just because it is
poetry.... I object to the tinkle. I object to the poetic license which
performs a Germanic divorce between subject and verb, so that instead
of a complete thought which can be mastered before another is set
before the brain, there is a twist in the grammatical sequence that
requires a conscious effort of will to keep the original thread. The
world is too busy to do this; reading must be a relaxation, not a
study.... When poetry conforms in its mental tone to the spirit of the
times; when it reflects the life and more or less the common thought of
the day, then more of the common people will read it.

There were other things in this letter which seemed to us of so much
importance that we submitted it as a whole to a Woman's Club of our
acquaintance. The nine ladies composing the club were not all literary,
but they were all of aesthetic pursuits, and together they brought a
good deal of culture to bear on the main points of the letter. They
were not quite of one mind, but they were so far agreed that what they
had to say might be fairly regarded as a consensus of opinion. We will
not attempt to report their remarks at any lengththey ran to all
lengthsbut in offering a resume of what they variously said to a sole
effect, we will do what we can to further the cause they joined in
defending.

The Musesfor we will no longer conceal that this Woman's Club was
composed of the tuneful Nineacknowledged that there was a great deal
in what their contrary-minded sister said. They did not blame her one
bit for the way she felt; they would have felt just so themselves in
her place; but being as it were professionally dedicated to the
beautiful in all its established forms, they thought themselves bound
to direct her attention to one or two aspects of the case which she had
apparently overlooked. They were only sorry that she was not there to
take her own part; and they confessed, in her behalf, that it was
ridiculous for poetry to turn the language upside down, and to take it
apart and put it together wrong-end to, as it did. If anybody spoke the
language so, or in prose wrote it so, they would certainly be a fool;
but the Muses wished the sister to observe that every art existed by
its convention, or by what in the moral world Ibsen would call its
life-lie. If you looked at it from the colloquial standpoint, music was
the absurdest thing in the world. In the orchestral part of an opera,
for instance, there were more repetitions than in the scolding of the
worst kind of shrew, and if you were to go about singing what you had
to say, and singing it over and over, and stretching it out by runs and
trills, or even expressing yourself in recitativo secco, it
would simply set people wild. In painting it was worse, if anything:
you had to make believe that things two inches high were life-size, and
that there were relief and distance where there was nothing but a flat
canvas, and that colors which were really like nothing in nature were
natural. As for sculpture, it was too laughable for anything, whether
you took it in bas-reliefs with persons stuck onto walls, half or
three-quarters out, or in groups with people in eternal action; or in
single figures, standing on one leg or holding out arms that would drop
off if they were not supported by stone pegs; or sitting down outdoors
bareheaded where they would take their deaths of cold, or get
sun-struck, or lay up rheumatism to beat the band, in the rain and snow
and often without a stitch of clothes on.

All this and more the Muses freely conceded to the position of the
contrary-minded correspondent of the Easy Chair, and having behaved so
handsomely, they felt justified in adding that her demand seemed to
them perfectly preposterous. It was the very essence and office of
poetry not to conform to the mental tone and spirit of the
times; and though it might very well reflect the life, it must not
reflect the common thought of the day upon pain of vulgarizing and
annulling itself. Poetry was static in its nature, and its business was
the interpretation of enduring beauty and eternal veracity. If it
stooped in submission to any such expectation as that expressed, and
dedicated itself to the crude vaticination of the transitory emotions
and opinions, it had better turn journalism at once. It had its law,
and its law was distinction of ideal and elevation of tendency, no
matter what material it dealt with. It might deal with the commonest,
the cheapest material, but always in such a way as to dignify and
beautify the material.

Concerning the first point, that modern poetry was wrong to indulge
all those inversions, those translocations, those ground and lofty
syntactical tumblings which have mainly constituted poetic license, the
ladies again relented, and allowed that there was much to say for what
our correspondent said. In fact, they agreed, or agreed as nearly as
nine ladies could, that it was perhaps time that poetry should, as it
certainly might, write itself straightforwardly, with the verb in its
true English place, and the adjective walking soberly before the noun;
shunning those silly elisions like ne'er and o'er, and,
above all, avoiding the weak and loathly omission of the definite
article. Of the tinkle, by which they supposed the contrary-minded
sister meant the rhyme, they said they could very well remember when
there was no such thing in poetry; their native Greek had got on
perfectly well without it, and even those poets at second-hand, the
Romans. They observed that though Dante used it, Shakespeare did not,
and Milton did not, in their greatest works; and a good half of the
time the first-rate moderns managed very well with blank verse.

The Easy Chair did not like to dissent from these ladies, both
because they were really great authorities and because it is always
best to agree with ladies when you can. Besides, it would not have
seemed quite the thing when they were inclining to this favorable view
of their sister's contrary-mindedness, to take sides against her. In
short, the Easy Chair reserved its misgivings for some such very
intimate occasion as this, when it could impart them without wounding
the susceptibilities of others, or risking a painful snub for itself.
But it appeared to the Chair that the Muses did not go quite far enough
in justifying the convention, or the life-lie, by which poetry, as a
form, existed. They could easily have proved that much of the mystical
charm which differences poetry from prose resides in its license, its
syntactical acrobatics, its affectations of diction, its elisions, its
rhymes. As a man inverting his head and looking at the landscape
between his legs gets an entirely new effect on the familiar prospect,
so literature forsaking the wonted grammatical attitudes really
achieves something richly strange by the novel and surprising postures
permissible in verse. The phrases, the lines, the stanzas which the ear
keeps lingering in its porches, loath to let them depart, are usually
full of these licenses. They have a witchery which could be as little
proved as denied; and when any poet proposes to forego them, and adhere
rigidly to the law of prose in his rhythm, he practises a loyalty which
is a sort of treason to his calling and will go far toward undoing him.

While the ladies of that club were talking, some such thoughts as
these were in our mind, suggested by summer-long reading of a dear,
delightful poet, altogether neglected in these days, who deserves to be
known again wherever reality is prized or simplicity is loved. It is
proof, indeed, how shallow was all the debate about realism and
romanticism that the poetic tales of George Crabbe were never once
alleged in witness of the charm which truth to condition and character
has, in whatever form. But once, long before that ineffectual clamor
arose, he was valued as he should be still. Edmund Burke was the first
to understand his purpose and appreciate his work. He helped the poet
not only with praises but with pounds till he could get upon his feet.
He introduced Crabbe's verse to his great friends, to Doctor Johnson,
who perceived at once that he would go far; to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who
felt the brother-artist in him; to the Lord Chancellor Thurlow, whose
oaths were harder than his heart toward the fearlessy fearful young
singer. The sympathy and admiration of the highest and the best
followed him through his long life to his death. The great Mr. Fox
loved him and his rhyme, and wished his tales to be read to him on the
bed he never left alive. Earl Grey, Lord Holland, and the brilliant
Canning wrote him letters of cordial acclaim; Walter Scott, the
generous, the magnanimous, hailed him brother, and would always have
his books by him; none of his poems appeared without the warmest
welcome, the most discriminating and applausive criticism from Jeffrey,
the first critic of his long day.

Crabbe had not only this exquisitely intelligent hearing, but he was
accepted on his own terms, as a poet who saw so much beauty in simple
and common life that he could not help painting it. He painted it in
pieces of matchless fidelity to the fact, with nothing of flattery, but
everything of charm in the likeness. His work is the enduring witness
of persons, circumstances, customs, experiences utterly passed from the
actual world, but recognizably true with every sincere reader. These
tales of village life in England a hundred years ago are of an absolute
directness and frankness. They blink nothing of the sordid, the mean,
the vicious, the wicked in that life, from which they rarely rise in
some glimpse of the state of the neighboring gentry, and yet they
abound in beauty that consoles and encourages. They are full of keen
analysis, sly wit, kindly humor, and of a satire too conscientious to
bear the name; of pathos, of compassion, of reverence, while in
unaffected singleness of ideal they are unsurpassed.

Will our contrary-minded correspondent believe that these studies,
these finished pictures, which so perfectly reflect the common life
... of the day, are full of the license, the tinkle, the German
divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her
soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet
in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as
it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he
could, with the same caesura, the same antithetical balance, the same
feats of rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the
sense in each couplet. The most artificial and the most natural poets
were at one in their literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of
Crabbe's impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material
unemployed in English poetry before, that you forget all the
affectations of the outward convention, or remember them only for a
pleasure in the quaintness of their use for his purposes. How
imperishable, anyway, is the interest of things important to the
spirit, the fancy, and how largely does this interest lie in the
freshness of the mind bringing itself to the things, how little in the
novelty of the things! The demand for strangeness in the things
themselves is the demand of the sophisticated mind: the mind which has
lost its simplicity in the process of continuing unenlightened. It is
this demand which betrays the mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race,
the sophistication of the English mind, and the obfuscation (which is
sophistication at second-hand) of the American mind. The
non-imaginative person is nowhere so much at home as in a voluntary
exile; and this may be why it was sometime said that travel is the
fool's paradise. For such a person to realize anything the terms are
that he shall go abroad, either into an alien scene or into a period of
the past; then he can begin to have some pleasure. He must first of all
get away from himself, and he is not to be blamed for that; any one
else would wish to get away from him. His exaction is not a test of
merit; it is merely the clew to a psychological situation which is
neither so novel nor so important as to require of our hard-worked
civilization the production of an order of more inspired criticism than
it has worried along with hitherto.

They sat together on a bench in the Park, far enough apart to
distinguish themselves from the many other pairs who were but too
obviously lovers. It could not be said quite that these two were
actually lovers; but there was an air of passionate provisionality over
and around them, a light such as in springtime seems to enfold the tree
before it takes the positive color of bud or blossom; and, with an eye
for literary material that had rarely failed him, he of the Easy Chair
perceived that they were a hero and heroine of a kind which he
instantly felt it a great pity he should not have met oftener in
fiction of late. As he looked at them he was more and more penetrated
by a delicate pathos in the fact that, such as he saw them, they
belonged in their fine sort to the great host of the Unemployed. No one
else might have seen it, but he saw, with that inner eye of his, which
compassion suffused but did not obscure, that they were out of a job,
and he was not surprised when he heard the young girl fetch a muted
sigh and then say: No, they don't want us any more. I don't understand
why; it is very strange; but it is perfectly certain.

Yes, there's no doubt of that, the young man returned, in a
despair tinged with resentment.

She was very pretty and he was handsome, and they were both
tastefully dressed, with a due deference to fashion, yet with a
personal qualification of the cut and color of their clothes which, if
it promised more than it could fulfil in some ways, implied a modest
self-respect, better than the arrogance of great social success or
worldly splendor. She could have been the only daughter of a widowed
father in moderate circumstances; or an orphan brought up by a careful
aunt, or a duteous sister in a large family of girls, with whom she
shared the shelter of a wisely ordered, if somewhat crowded, home; or
she could have been a serious student of any of the various arts and
sciences which girls study now in an independence compatible with true
beauty of behavior. He might have been a young lawyer or doctor or
business man; or a painter or architect; or a professor in some college
or a minister in charge of his first parish. What struck the observer
in them and pleased him was that they seemed of that finer American
average which is the best, and, rightly seen, the most interesting
phase of civilized life yet known.

I sometimes think, the girl resumed, in the silence of her
companion, that I made a mistake in my origin or my early education.
It's a great disadvantage, in fiction nowadays, for a girl to speak
grammatically, as I always do, without any trace of accent or dialect.
Of course, if I had been high-born or low-born in the olden times,
somewhere or other, I shouldn't have to be looking for a place now; or
if I had been unhappily married, or divorced, or merely separated from
my husband, the story-writers would have had some use for me. But I
have tried always to be good and nice and lady-like, and I haven't been
in a short story for ages.

Is it so bad as that? the young man asked, sadly.

Quite. If I could only have had something askew in my heredity, I
know lots of authoresses who would have jumped at me. I can't do
anything wildly adventurous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary
period, because I'm so afraid; but I know that in the course of modern
life I've always been fairly equal to emergencies, and I don't believe
that I should fail in case of trouble, or that if it came to poverty I
should be ashamed to share the deprivations that fell to my lot. I
don't think I'm very selfish; I would be willing to stay in town all
summer if an author wanted me, and I know I could make it interesting
for his readers. I could marry an English nobleman if it was really
necessary, and, if I didn't like to live in England because I was fond
of my own country, I believe I could get him to stay here half the time
with me; and that would appeal to a large class. I don't know whether I
would care to be rescued a great deal; it would depend upon what it was
from. But I could stand a great deal of pain if need be, and I hope
that if it came to anything like right or wrong I should act
conscientiously. In society, I shouldn't mind any amount of dancing or
dining or teaing, and I should be willing to take my part in the
lighter athletics. But, she ended, as she began, with a sigh, I'm not
wanted.

Yes, I see what you mean, the young man said, with a thoughtful
knot between his brows. I'm not wanted myself, at present, in the
short stories; but in the last dozen or so where I had an engagement I
certainly didn't meet you; and it is pleasant to be paired off in a
story with a heroine who has the instincts and habits of a lady. Of
course, a hero is only something in an author's fancy, and I've no
right to be exacting; but it does go against me to love a girl who
ropes cattle, or a woman who has a past, or a husband, or something of
the kind. I always do my best for the author, but I can't forget that
I'm a gentleman, and it's difficult to win a heroine when the very idea
of her makes you shudder. I sometimes wonder how the authors would like
it themselves if they had to do what they expect of us in that way.
They're generally very decent fellows, good husbands and fathers, who
have married lady-like girls and wouldn't think of associating with a
shady or ignorant person.

The authoresses are quite as inconsistent, the professional
heroine rejoined. They wouldn't speak to the kind of young men whom
they expect a heroine to be passionately in love with. They must know
how very oddly a girl feels about people who are outside of the world
she's been brought up in. It isn't enough that a man should be very
noble at heart and do grand things, or save your life every now and
then, or be masterful and use his giant will to make you in love with
him. I don't see why they can't let one have, now and then, the kind of
husbands they get for themselves. For my part, I should like always to
give my heart to a normal, sensible, well-bred, conscientious,
agreeable man who could offer me a pleasant homeI wouldn't mind the
suburbs; and I could work with him and work for him till I droppedthe
kind of man that the real world seems to be so full of. I've never had
a fair chance to show what was in me; I've always been placed in such a
false position. Now I have no position at all, not even a false one!

Her companion was silent for a while. Then he said: Yes, they all
seem, authors and authoresses both, to lose sight of the fact that the
constitution of our society is more picturesque, more dramatic, more
poetical than any in the world. We can have the play of all the
passions and emotions in ordinary, innocent love-making that other
peoples can have only on the worst conditions; and yet the
story-writers won't avail themselves of the beauty that lies next to
their hands. They go abroad for impossible circumstances, or they want
to bewitch ours with the chemistry of all sorts of eccentric
characters, exaggerated incentives, morbid propensities, pathological
conditions, or diseased psychology. As I said before, I know I'm only a
creature of the storyteller's fancy, and a creature out of work at
that; but I believe I was imagined in a good momentI'm sure you
wereand I should like an engagement in an honest, wholesome
situation. I think I could do creditable work in it.

I know you could, the heroine rejoined, fervently, almost
tenderly, so that it seemed to the listener there was an involuntary
rapprochement of their shadowy substances on the bench where they
floated in a sitting posture. I don't want to be greedy; I believe in
living and letting live. I think the abnormal has just as good a right
to be in the stories as the normal; but why shut the normal out
altogether? What I should like to ask the short-story writers is
whether they and their readers are so bored with themselves and the
people they know in the real world that they have no use for anything
like its average in their fiction. It's impossible for us to change

I shouldn't wish you to change, the hero said, so fondly
that the witness trembled for something more demonstrative.

Thank you! But what I mean is, couldn't they change a
little? Couldn't they give us another trial? They've been using the
abnormal, in some shape or other, so long that I should think they
would find a hero and heroine who simply fell in love at a dance or a
dinner, or in a house-party or at a picnic, and worked out their
characters to each other, through the natural worry and difficulty, and
pleasure and happiness, till they got marrieda relief from, well, the
other thing. I'm sure if they offered me the chance, I could make
myself attractive to their readers, and I believe I should have the
charm of novelty.

You would have more than the charm of novelty, the hero said, and
the witness trembled again for the convenances which one so
often sees offended on the benches in the Park. But then he remembered
that these young people were avowedly nice, and that they were morally
incapable of misbehavior. And for a time, at least, I believe youI
believe we, for I must necessarily be engaged with youwould
succeed. The difficulty would be to get the notion of our employment to
the authors. It was on the listener's tongue to say that he thought he
could manage that, when the hero arrested him with the sad misgiving,
But they would say we were commonplace, and that would kill the chance
of our ever having a run.

A tremendous longing filled the witness, a potent desire to rescue
this engaging pair from the dismay into which they fell at the fatal
word. No, no! he conjured them. Not commonplace. A judicious
paragraph anticipative of your reappearance could be arranged, in which
you could be hailed as the normal hero and heroine, and greeted
as a grateful relief from the hackneyed freaks and deformities of the
prevalent short story, or the impassioned paper-doll pattern of the
mediaeval men and maidens, or the spotted and battered figures of the
studies in morbid analysis which pass for fiction in the magazines. We
must get that luminous word normal before the reading public at
once, and you will be rightly seen in its benign ray and recognized
from the startyes! in advance of the startfor what you are:
types of the loveliness of our average life, the fairest blossoms of
that faith in human nature which has flourished here into the most
beautiful and glorious civilization of all times. With us the average
life is enchanting, the normal is the exquisite. Have patience, have
courage; your time is coming again!

It seemed to him that the gentle shapes wavered in his vehement
breath, and he could not realize that in their alien realm they could
not have heard a word he uttered. They remained dreamily silent, as if
he had not spoken, and then the heroine said: Perhaps we shall have to
wait for a new school of short-story writers before we can get back
into the magazines. Some beginner must see in us what has always
pleased: the likeness to himself or herself, the truth to nature, the
loyalty to the American ideal of happiness. He will find that we easily
and probably end well, and that we're a consolation and refuge
for readers, who can take heart from our happy denouements, when they
see a family resemblance in us, and can reasonably hope that if they
follow our examples they will share our blessings. Authors can't really
enjoy themselves in the company of those degenerates, as I call
them. They're mostly as young and right-principled and well-behaved as
ourselves, and, if they could get to know us, we should be the best of
friends. They would realize that there was plenty of harmless fun, as
well as love, in the world, and that there was lots of good-luck.

Like ours, now, with no work and no prospect of it? he returned,
in his refusal to be persuaded, yet ready to be comforted.

Having set out on that road, she would not turn back; she persisted,
like any woman who is contraried, no matter how far she ends from her
first position: Yes, like ours now. For this is probably the dark hour
before the dawn. We must wait.

And perish in the mean time?

Oh, we shall not perish, she responded, heroinically. It's not
for nothing that we are immortal, and as she spoke she passed her
translucent hand through his arm, and, rising, they drifted off
together and left the emissary of the Easy Chair watching them till
they mixed with the mists under the trees in the perspective of the
Mall.

In the morning the trees stood perfectly still: yellow,
yellowish-green, crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air stirred their
stricken foliage, but the leaves left the spray and dripped silently,
vertically down, with a faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears
of a grief which is too inward for any other outward sign; an absent
grief, almost self-forgetful. By-and-by, softly, very softly, as Nature
does things when she emulates the best Art and shuns the showiness and
noisiness of the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea,
which turned iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the trees began to
bend, and writhe, and sigh, and moan; and their leaves flew through the
air, and blew and scuttled over the grass, and in an hour all the
boughs were bare. The summer, which had been living till then and
dying, was now dead.

That was the reason why certain people who had been living with it,
and seemed dying in it, were now in a manner dead with it, so that
their ghosts were glad to get back to town, where the ghosts of
thousands and hundreds of thousands of others were hustling in the
streets and the trolleys and subways and elevateds, and shops and
factories and offices, and making believe to be much more alive than
they were in the country. Yet the town, the haunt of those harassed and
hurried spectres, who are not without their illusory hilarity, their
phantasmal happiness, has a charm which we of the Easy Chair always
feel, on first returning to it in the autumn, and which the
representative of the family we are imagining finds rather an
impassioned pleasure in. He came on to New York, while the others
lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused himself very well, in
a shadowy sort, looking at those other shades who had arrived in like
sort, or different, and were there together with him in those fine days
just preceding the election; after which the season broke in tears
again, and the autumn advanced another step toward winter.

There is no moment of the New York year which is more characteristic
of it than that mid-autumnal moment, which the summer and the winter
are equally far from. Mid-May is very well, and the weather then is
perfect, but that is a moment pierced with the unrest of going or
getting ready to go away. The call of the eld in Europe, or the call of
the wild in Newport, has already depopulated our streets of what is
richest and naturally best in our city life; the shops, indeed, show a
fevered activity in the near-richest and near-best who are providing
for their summer wants at mountain or sea-shore; but the theatres are
closing like fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every
outward breeze; the tables d'hote express a relaxed enterprise in the
nonchalance of the management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from
their hollow rooms; the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of
their windows in a show of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the
provision-men merely disgust with their retarded displays of butcher's
meats and poultry.

[Illustration: BROADWAY AT NIGHT]

But with what a difference the mid-autumn of the town welcomes its
returners! Ghosts, we have called them, mainly to humor a figure we
began with, but they are ghosts rather in the meaning of revenants, which is a good meaning enough. They must be a very aged or very
stupid sort of revenants if their palingenetic substance does
not thrill at the first nightly vision of Broadway, of that fairy flare
of electric lights, advertising whiskeys and actresses and beers, and
luring the beholder into a hundred hotels and theatres and restaurants.
It is now past the hour of roof-gardens with their songs and dances,
but the vaudeville is in full bloom, and the play-houses are blossoming
in the bills of their new comedies and operas and burlesques. The
pavements are filled, but not yet crowded, with people going to dinner
at the tables d'hote; the shop windows glitter and shine, and promise a
delight for the morrow which the morrow may or may not realize.

But as yet the town is not replete to choking, as it will be later,
when those who fancy they constitute the town have got back to it from
their Europes, their Newports, their Bar Harbors, their Lenoxes, their
Tuxedos, weary of scorning delights and living laborious days in that
round of intellectual and moral events duly celebrated in the society
news of the Sunday papers. Fifth Avenue abounds in automobiles but does
not yet super-abound; you do not quite take your life in your hand in
crossing the street at those corners where there is no policeman's hand
to put it in. Everywhere are cars, carts, carriages; and the motorist
whirs through the intersecting streets and round the corners, bent on
suicide or homicide, and the kind old trolleys and hansoms that once
seemed so threatening have almost become so many arks of safety from
the furious machines replacing them. But a few short years ago the
passer on the Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty
automobiles in his walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza; now he can
easily number hundreds, without an emotion of self-approval.

But their abundance is only provisional, a mere forecast of the
superabundance to come. All things are provisional, all sights, all
sounds, and this forms the peculiar charm of the hour, its haunting and
winning charm. If you take the omnibus-top to be trundled whiningly up
to one of the farther east-side entrances of the Park, and then
dismount and walk back to the Plaza through it, you are even more
keenly aware of the suspensive quality of the time. The summer, which
you left for dead by mountain or sea-shore, stirs with lingering
consciousness in the bland air of the great pleasance. Many leaves are
yet green on the trees, and where they are not green and not there they
are gay on the grass under the trees. There are birds, not, to be sure,
singing, but cheerfully chirping; and there are occasional blazons of
courageous flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern
blasts will soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers
who have frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who
cumber the footway before them with their perambulators. The fat
squirrels waddle over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the
sturdy beggar at the passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is
high carnival of the children with hoops and balls; it is the supreme
moment of the saddle-donkeys in the by-paths, and the carriage-goats in
the Mall, and of the rowboats on the ponds, which presently will be
withdrawn for their secret hibernation, where no man can find them out.
When the first snow flies, even while it is yet poising for flight in
the dim pits of air, all these delights will have vanished, and the
winter, which will claim the city for its own through a good four
months, will be upon it.

Always come back, therefore, if you must come at all, about the
beginning of November, and if you can manage to take in Election Day,
and especially Election Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York
has five saturnalia every year: New Year's Night, Decoration Day,
Fourth of July, Election Night, and Thanksgiving, and not the least of
these is Election Night. If it is a right first Tuesday of November,
the daytime wind will be veering from west to south and back, sun and
cloud will equally share the hours between them, and a not unnatural
quiet, as of political passions hushed under the blanket of the
Australian ballot, will prevail. The streets will be rather emptied
than filled, and the litter of straw and scrap-paper, and the ordure
and other filth of the great slattern town, will blow agreeably about
under your feet and into your eyes and teeth. But with the falling of
the night there will be a rise of the urban spirits; the sidewalks will
thicken with citizens of all ages and sexes and nations; and if you
will then seek some large centre for the cinematographic dissemination
of the election news, you will find yourself one of a multitude
gloating on the scenes of comedy and tragedy thrown up on the canvas to
stay your impatience for the returns. Along the curbstones are
stationed wagons for the sale of the wind and string instruments, whose
raw, harsh discords of whistling and twanging will begin with the sight
of the vote from the first precinct. Meantime policemen, nervously
fondling their clubs in their hands, hang upon the fringes of the
crowd, which is yet so good-natured that it seems to have no impulse
but to lift children on its shoulders and put pretty girls before it,
and caress old women and cripples into favorable positions, so that
they may see better. You will wish to leave it before the clubbing
begins, and either go home to the slumbers which the whistling and
twanging will duly attend; or join the diners going into or coming out
of the restaurants, or the throngs strolling down into the fairy realms
of Broadway, under the flare of the whiskeys and the actresses.

At such a time it is best to be young, but it is not so very bad to
be old, for the charm of the hour, the air, and the place is such that
even the heart of age must rise a little at it. What the night may
really be, if it is not positively raining, you do not know or need to
know. Those soft lamps overhead, which might alike seem let garlanding
down from the vault above or flowering up from the gulfs below out of a
still greater pyrotechnic richness, supply the defect, if there is any,
of moon and stars. Only the air is actual, the air of the New York
night, which is as different from that of the London night as from that
of the Paris night, or, for all we know, the St. Petersburg night. At
times we have fancied in its early autumnal tones something Florentine,
something Venetian, but, after all, it is not quite either, even when
the tones of these are crudest. It is the subtlest, the most
penetrating expression of the New York temperament; but what that is,
who shall say? That mystic air is haunted little from the past, for
properly speaking there never was a city so unhistorical in
temperament. A record of civic corruption, running back to the first
servants of the Dutch Companies, does not constitute municipal history,
and our part in national events from the time we felt the stirrings of
national consciousness has not been glorious, as these have not been
impressive. Of New York's present at any given moment you wish to say
in her patient-impatient slang, Forget it, forget it. There remains
only the future from which she can derive that temperamental effect in
her night air; but, again, what that is, who shall say? If any one were
so daring, he might say it was confidence modified by anxiety; a rash
expectation of luck derived from immunity for past transgression; the
hopes of youth shot with youth's despairs: not sweet, innocent youth,
but youth knowing and experienced, though not unwilling to shun evil
because of the bad morrow it sometimes brings. No other city under the
sun, we doubt, is so expressive of that youth: that modern youth, able,
agile, eager, audacious; not the youth of the poets, but the youth of
the true, the grim realists.

[Illustration: ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS]

Something, a faint, faint consciousness of this, visits even the sad
heart of age on any New York night when it is not raining too hard, and
one thinks only of getting indoors, where all nights are alike. But
mostly it comes when the autumn is dreaming toward winter in that
interlude of the seasons which we call Indian Summer. It is a stretch
of time which we have handsomely bestowed upon our aborigines, in
compensation for the four seasons we have taken from them, like some of
those Reservations which we have left them in lieu of the immeasurable
lands we have alienated. It used to be longer than it is now; it used
to be several weeks long; in the sense of childhood, it was almost
months. It is still qualitatively the same, and it is more than any
other time expressive of the New York temperament, perhaps because we
have honored in the civic ideal the polity of our Indian predecessors,
and in Tammany and its recurrently triumphant braves, have kept their
memory green. But if this is not so, the spiritual fact remains, and
under the sky of the Election Night you feel New York as you do
in no other hour. The sense extends through the other autumn nights
till that night, sure to come, when the pensive weather breaks in
tears, and the next day it rains and rains, and the streets stream with
the flood, and the dull air reeks with a sort of inner steam, hot,
close, and sticky as a brother: a brother whose wants are many and
whose resources are few. The morning after the storm, there will be a
keen thrill in the air, keen but wholesome and bracing as a good
resolution and not necessarily more lasting. The asphalt has been
washed as clean as a renovated conscience, and the city presses forward
again to the future in which alone it has its being, with the gay
confidence of a sinner who has forgiven himself his sins and is no
longer sorry for them.

After that interlude, when the streets of the Advanced Vaudeville,
which we know as New York, begin again and continue till the Chasers
come in late May, there will be many other sorts of weather, but none
so characteristic of her. There will be the sort of weather toward the
end of January, when really it seems as if nothing else could console
him for the intolerable freezing and thawing, the snow upon snow, the
rain upon rain, the winds that soak him and the winds that shrivel him,
and the suns that mock him from a subtropic sky through subarctic air.
We foresee him then settling into his arm-chair, while the wind
whistles as naturally as the wind in the theatre around the angles of
his lofty flat, and drives the snow of the shredded paper through the
air or beats it in soft clots against the pane. He turns our page, and
as he catches our vague drift, before yielding himself wholly to its
allure, he questions, as readers like to do, whether the writer is
altogether right in his contention that the mid-autumnal moment is the
most characteristic moment of the New York year. Is not the mid-winter
moment yet more characteristic? He conjures up, in the rich content of
his indoor remoteness, the vision of the vile street below his flat,
banked high with the garnered heaps of filthy snow, which alternately
freeze and thaw, which the rain does not wash nor the wind blow away,
and which the shredded-paper flakes are now drifting higher. He sees
the foot-passers struggling under their umbrellas toward the avenues
where the reluctant trolleys pause jarringly for them, and the elevated
trains roar along the trestle overhead; where the saloon winks a wicked
eye on every corner; where the signs of the whiskeys and actresses
flare through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across
the trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter
of the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more
respectful vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and
best, who have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and
are forcing the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras.
He himself remains midway between the last fall and the next spring;
and perhaps he decides against the writer, as the perverse reader
sometimes will, and holds that this hour of suspense and misgiving is
the supreme, the duodecimal hour of the metropolitan dial. He may be
right; who knows? New York's hours are all characteristic; and the hour
whose mystical quality we have been trying to intimate is already past,
and we must wait another year before we can put it to the test again;
wait till the trees once more stand perfectly still: yellow,
yellowish-green, crimson, russet, and the wind comes up and blows them
bare, and yet another summer is dead, and the mourners, the ghosts, the
revenants have once more returned to town.

A constant reader of the Easy Chair has come to it with a difficulty
which, at the generous Christmas-tide, we hope his fellow-readers will
join us in helping solve: they may, if they like, regard it as a merry
jest of the patron saint of the day, a sort of riddle thrown upon the
table at the general feast for each to try his wits upon

Across the walnuts and the wine.

How, this puzzled spirit has asked, shall I address a friend of
mine who, besides being a person of civil condition, with a right to
the respect that we like to show people of standing in directing our
letters to them, has the distinction of being a doctor of philosophy,
of letters, and of laws by the vote of several great universities?
Shall I greet him as, say, Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes,
or Smythe Johnes, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., or simply Mr. Smythe Johnes?

Decidedly, we should answer, to begin with, not Mr. Smythe
Johnes if you wish to keep the finest bloom on your friendship with
any man who knows the world. He will much prefer being addressed simply
Smythe Johnes, with his street and number, for he feels himself
classed by your Mr. Smythe Johnes with all those Mr. Smythe Johneses
whom he loves and honors in their quality of tradesmen and working-men,
but does not hold of quite the same social rank as himself. After our
revolt in essentials from the English in the eighteenth century, we are
now conforming more and more in the twentieth to their usages in
non-essentials, and the English always write Smythe Johnes, Esq., or
Dr. Smythe Johnes or the like, unless Mr. Smythe Johnes is in trade or
below it. They, indeed, sometimes carry their scruple so far that they
will address him as Mr. Smythe Johnes at his place of business, and
Smythe Johnes, Esq., at his private residence.

The English, who like their taffy thick and slab, and who, if one of
them happens to be the Earl of Tolloller, are not richly enough
satisfied to be so accosted by letter, but exact some such address as
The Right Honorable the Earl of Tolloller, all like distinctions in
their taffy, and are offended if you give them a commoner sort than
they think their due. But the Americans, who pretend to a manlier
self-respect, had once pretty generally decided upon Mr. Smythe Johnes
as the right direction for his letters. They argued that Esquire was
the proper address for lawyers, apparently because lawyers are so
commonly called Squire in the simpler life. In the disuse of the older
form of Armiger they forgot that inter arma silent leges, and
that Esquire was logically as unfit for lawyers as for civil doctors,
divines, or mediciners. He of the Easy Chair, when an editor long ago,
yielded to the prevalent American misrendering for a time, and
indiscriminately addressed all his contributors as Mr. One of them,
the most liberal of them in principle, bore the ignominy for about a
year, and then he protested. After that the young editor (he was then
almost as young as any one now writing deathless fiction)
indiscriminately addressed his contributors as Esq. Yet he had an
abiding sense of the absurdity in directing letters to John G.
Whittier, Esq., for if the poet was truly a Friend and an abhorrer of
war, he could not be hailed Armiger without something like insult.

With doctors of divinity the question is not so vexing or vexed; but
it is said that of late a lion is rising in the way of rightly
addressing doctors of medicine. If you wish to be attended by a
physician who pays all visits after nightfall in evening dress, it is
said that you are now to write Smythe Johnes, M.D., Esq., and not Dr.
Smythe Johnes, as formerly. In England, the source of all our
ceremonial woes, you cannot call a surgeon doctor without offence; he
is Mr. Smythe Johnes when spoken to, but whether he is Mr. Smythe
Johnes through the post, Heaven knows.

It is a thousand pities that when we cut ourselves off from that
troubled source politically, we did not dam it up in all the things of
etiquette. We indeed struck for freedom and sense at the very highest
point, and began at once to write George Washington, President, as we
still write William H. Taft, President. The Chief Magistrate is offered
no taffy in our nation, or perhaps the word President is held to be
taffy enough and to spare; for only the Governor of Massachusetts is
legally even so much as Excellency. Yet by usage you are expected to
address all ambassadors and ministers as Excellencies, and all persons
in public office from members of Congress and of the Cabinet down to
the lowest legislative or judicial functionaries as Honorables. This
simplifies the task of directing envelopes to them, and, if a man once
holds military rank in any peace establishment, he makes life a little
easier for his correspondents by remaining General, or Captain, or
Admiral, or Commander. You cannot Mister him, and you cannot Esquire
him, and there is, therefore, no question as to what you shall
superscribe him.

A score of years ago two friends, now, alas! both doctors of
philosophy, of letters, and of laws, agreed to superscribe their
letters simply Smythe Johnes and Johnes Smythe respectively, without
any vain prefix or affix. They kept up this good custom till in process
of time they went to Europe for prolonged sojourns, and there corrupted
their manners, so that when they came home they began addressing each
other as Esq., and have done so ever since. Neither is any the better
for the honors they exchange on the envelopes they do not look at, and
doubtless if mankind could be brought to the renunciation of the vain
prefixes and affixes which these friends once disused the race would be
none the worse for it, but all the better. One prints Mr. Smythe Johnes
on one's visiting-card because it passes through the hands of a menial
who is not to be supposed for a moment to announce plain Smythe Johnes;
but it is the United States post-office which delivers the letters of
Smythe Johnes, and they can suffer no contamination from a service
which conveys the letters of plain William H. Taft to him with merely
the explanatory affix of President, lest they should go to some other
William H. Taft.

Undoubtedly the address of a person by the name with which he was
christened can convey no shadow of disrespect. The Society of Friends
understood this from the beginning, and they felt that they were
wanting in no essential civility when they refused name-honor as well
as hat-honor to all and every. They remained covered in the highest
presences, and addressed each by his Christian name, without conveying
slight; so that a King and Queen of England, who had once questioned
whether they could suffer themselves to be called Thy Majesty instead
of Your Majesty by certain Quakers, found it no derogation of their
dignity to be saluted as Friend George and Friend Charlotte. The
signory of the proudest republic in the world held that their family
names were of sufficiency to which titles could add nothing, and the
Venetian who called himself Loredano, or Gradenigo, or Morosini, or
Renier, or Rezzonico did not ask to be called differently. In our own
day a lady of the ancient and splendid family of the Peruzzi in
Florence denied that the title of count existed in it or need exist:
Ognuno puo essere conte: Peruzzi, no. (Any one may be a count; but
not a Peruzzi.) In like manner such names as Lincoln and Franklin, and
Washington and Grant, and Longfellow and Bryant could have gained
nothing by Mr. before them or Esq. after them. Doctor Socrates or
Doctor Seneca would not have descended to us in higher regard with the
help of these titles; and Rear-Admiral Themistocles or Major-General
Epaminondas could not have had greater glory from the survival of
parchments so directed to them.

The Venetian nobles who disdained titles came in process of time to
be saluted as Illustrissimo; but in process of time this address when
used orally began to shed its syllables till Illustrissimo became
Lustrissimo, and then Strissimo, and at last Striss, when perhaps the
family name again sufficed. So with us, Doctor has familiarly become
Doc, and Captain, Cap, until one might rather have no title at all.
Mr. itself is a grotesque malformation of a better word, and Miss is a
silly shortening of the fine form of Mistress. This, pronounced Misses,
can hardly add dignity to the name of the lady addressed, though
doubtless it cannot be disused till we are all of the Society of
Friends. The popular necessity has resulted in the vulgar vocative use
of Lady, but the same use of Gentleman has not even a vulgar success,
though it is not unknown. You may say, with your hand on the
bell-strap, Step lively, lady, but you cannot say, Step lively,
gentleman, and the fine old vocative Sir is quite obsolete. We
ourselves remember it on the tongues of two elderly men who greeted
each other with Sir! and Sir! when they met; and Step lively,
sir, might convey the same delicate regard from the trolley conductor
as Step lively, lady. Sir might look very well on the back of a
letter; Smythe Johnes, Sir, would on some accounts be preferable to
Smythe Johnes, Esq., and, oddly enough, it would be less archaic.

Such of our readers as have dined with the late Queen or the present
King of England will recall how much it eased the yoke of ceremony to
say to the sovereign, Yes, ma'am, or Yes, sir, as the use is,
instead of your Majesty. But to others you cannot say Yes, ma'am, or
Yes, sir, unless you are in that station of life to which you would
be very sorry it had pleased God to call you. Yet these forms seem
undeniably fit when used by the young to their elders, if the
difference of years is great enough.

The difficulty remains, however. You cannot as yet write on an
envelope, Smythe Johnes, Sir, or Mary Johnes, Lady; and, in view of
this fact, we find ourselves no nearer the solution of our constant
reader's difficulty than we were at first. The Socialists, who wish to
simplify themselves and others, would address Mr. Johnes as Comrade
Smythe Johnes, but could they address Mrs. Johnes as Comradess? We
fancy not; besides, Comrade suggests arms and bloodshed, which is
hardly the meaning of the red flag of brotherhood, and at the best
Comrade looks affected and sounds even more so. Friend would be better,
but orally, on the lips of non-Quakers, it has an effect of patronage,
though no one could rightly feel slight in a letter addressed to him as
Friend Smythe Johnes.

It is wonderful to consider how the ancients apparently got on
without the use of any sort of prefix or affix to their names on the
roll of parchment or fold of papyrus addressed to them. For all we
know, Caesar was simply C. Julius Caesar to his correspondents, and
Pericles was yet more simply Pericles to the least of his
fellow-citizens. These historical personages may have had the number of
their houses inscribed on their letters; or Pericles might have had Son
of Xanthippus added to his name for purposes of identification; but
apparently he managed quite as well as our Presidents, without anything
equivalent to Excellency or Hon. or Mr. or Esq. To be sure, with the
decline of

The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,

name-honors crept in more and more. It was then not only politer but
much safer to address your petition To the Divine Domitian, or To the
Divine Nero, than to greet those emperors by the mere given names which
were not yet Christian; probably it would not have been enough to add
Caesar to the last name, though Caesar seems to have finally served the
turn of Esq., for all the right that the emperors had to bear it. In
the Eastern Empire, we are not ready to say what was the correct style
for imperial dignitaries; but among the sovereigns who divided the
Roman state and inherited its splendor, some rulers came to be sacred
majesties, though this is still a sensible remove from divine.

However, our present difficulty is with that vast average who in
common parlance are Mr. and Mrs. Smythe Johnes. How shall they be
styled on the backs of their letters? How shall Mrs. Smythe Johnes
especially, in signing herself Mary Johnes, indicate that she is not
Miss Mary but Mrs. Smythe Johnes? When she is left a widow, how soon
does she cease to be Mrs. Smythe Johnes and become Mrs. Mary? Is it
requisite to write in the case of any literary doctorate, Smythe
Johnes, LL.D., or Litt.D., or Ph.D., or is it sufficient to write Dr.
before his name? In the case of a divine, do you put Rev. Dr. before
the name, or Rev. before it and D.D. after it? These are important
questions, or, if they are not important, they are at least
interesting. Among the vast mass of unceremonied, or call it
unmannered, Americans the receiver of a letter probably knows no better
than the sender how it should be addressed; but in the rarer case in
which he does know, his self-respect or his self-love is wounded if it
is misaddressed. It is something like having your name misspelled,
though of course not so bad as that, quite; and every one would be glad
to avoid the chance of it.

The matter is very delicate and can hardly be managed by
legislation, as it was on the point of our pen to suggest it should be.
The first French Republic, one and indivisible, decreed a really
charming form of address, which could be used without offence to the
self-love or the self-respect of any one. Citoyen for all men and
Citoyenne for all women was absolutely tasteful, modest, and dignified;
but some things, though they are such kindred things, cannot be done as
well as others. The same imaginative commonwealth invented a decimal
chronology, and a new era, very handy and very clear; but the old week
of seven days came back and replaced the week of ten days, and the Year
of our Lord resumed the place of the Year of the Republic, as Monsieur
and Madame returned victorious over Citoyen and Citoyenne. Yet the
reform of weights and measures, when once established, continued, and
spread from France to most other countriesto nearly all, indeed, less
stupid than Great Britain and the United Statesso that the whole
civilized world now counts in grammes and metres. What can be the fine
difference? Here is a pretty inquiry for the psychologist, who has an
opportunity to prove himself practically useful. Is it that grammes and
metres are less personal than week-days and addresses? That can hardly
be, or else the Society of Friends could not have so absolutely
substituted First Day and Second Day, etc., for the old heathen names
of our week-days, and could not have successfully refused all
name-honor whatsoever in addressing their fellow-mortals.

But titles have come back full-tide in the third French Republic,
one and indivisible, so that anybody may wear them, though the oldest
nobility are officially and legally known only by their Christian and
family names, without any prefix. This is practically returning to
Citoyen and Citoyenne, and it almost gives us the courage to suggest
the experiment of Citizen and Citizenne as a proper address on the
letters of American republicans. The matter might be referred to a
Board, something like that of the Simplified Spelling Board, though we
should not like to be included in a committee whose members must be
prepared to take their lives in their hands, or, short of death, to
suffer every manner of shame at the hands of our journalists and their
correspondents. Short of the adoption of Citizen and Citizenne, we have
no choice but to address one another by our given names and surnames
merely, unless we prefer to remain in our present confusion of Mr. and
Esq. In a very little while, we dare say, no lady or gentleman would
mind being so addressed on his or her letters; but perhaps some men and
women might. Now that we no longer use pets names so much, except among
the very highest of our noblesse, where there are still Jimmies and
Mamies, we believe, plain Gladys Smythe or Reginald Johnes would be the
usual superscription. Such an address could bring no discomfort to the
recipient (a beautiful word, very proper in this connection), and if it
could once be generally adopted it would save a great deal of anxiety.
The lady's condition could be indicated by the suffix Spinster, in the
case of her being single; if married, the initials of her husband's
given names could be added.

Among the high excitements of a recent winter in New York was one of
such convulsive intensity that in the nature of things it could not
last very long. It affected the feminine temperament of our public with
hysterical violence, but left the community the calmer for its throes,
and gently, if somewhat pensively, smiling in a permanent ignorance of
the event. No outside observer would now be able to say, offhand,
whether a certain eminent innkeeper had or had not had his way with his
customers in the matter not only of what they should eat or drink, but
what they should wear when dining in a place which has been described
as supplying exclusiveness to the lower classes. It is not even
certain just how a crucial case was brought to the notice of this
authority; what is certain is that his instant judgment was that no
white male citizen frequenting his proud tavern should sit at dinner
there unless clothed in a dress-coat, or at least in the smoking-jacket
known to us as a Tuxedo; at breakfast or at luncheon, probably, the
guest, the paying guest, could sufficiently shine in the reflected
glory of the lustrous evening wear of the waiters. No sooner was the
innkeeper's judgment rendered than a keen thrill of resentment, or at
least amusement, ran through the general breast. From every quarter the
reporters hastened to verify the fact at first-hand, and then to submit
it to the keeper of every other eminent inn or eating-house in the city
and learn his usage and opinion. These to a man disavowed any such
hard-and-fast rule. Though their paying guests were ordinarily
gentlemen of such polite habits as to be incapable of dining in
anything but a dress-coat or a Tuxedo, yet their inns and eating-houses
were not barred against those who chose to dine in a frock or cutaway
or even a sacque. It is possible that the managers imagined themselves
acquiring merit with that large body of our vulgar who demand
exclusiveness by their avowal of a fine indifference or an enlightened
tolerance in the matter. But at this distance of time no one can
confidently say how the incident was closed with respect to the
pre-eminent innkeeper and his proud tavern. Whether the wayfarer,
forced by the conditions of travel upon the company of the exclusive
vulgar, may now dine there in the public banqueting-hall in his daytime
raiment, or must take his evening meal in his room, with a penalty in
the form of an extra charge for service, nowise appears.

What is apparent from the whole affair is that the old ideal of
one's inn, as a place where one shall take one's ease, has perished in
the evolution of the magnificent American hotel which we have been
maliciously seeking to minify in the image of its Old World germ. One
may take one's ease in one's hotel only if one is dressed to the mind
of the hotel-keeper, or perhaps finally the head waiter. But what is
more important still is that probably the vast multitude of the moneyed
vulgar whose exclusiveness is supplied to them in such a place dictate,
tacitly at least, the Draconian policy of the management. No innkeeper
or head waiter, no matter of how patrician an experience or prejudice,
would imagine a measure of such hardship to wayfarers willing to pay
for the simple comfort of their ancestors at the same rate as their
commensals stiffly shining in the clothes of convention. The management
might have its conception of what a hotel dining-room should look like,
with an unbroken array of gentlemen in black dress-coats and ladies in
white shoulders all feeding as superbly as if they were not paying for
their dinners, or as if they had been severally asked for the pleasure
of their company two weeks before; and the picture would doubtless be
marred by figures of people in cutaways and high necks, to a degree
intolerable to the artistic sense. But it is altogether impossible that
the management would exact a conformity to the general effect which was
not desired by the vast majority of its paying guests. What might well
have seemed a break on the part of the pre-eminent innkeeper when he
cited as a precedent for his decision the practice of the highest
hotels in London was really no break, but a stroke of the finest
juridical acumen. Nothing could have gone further with the vast
majority of his paying guests than some such authority, for they could
wish nothing so much, in the exclusiveness supplied them, as the
example of the real characters in the social drama which they were
impersonating. They had the stage and the scenery; they had spared no
expense in their costuming; they had anxiously studied their parts, and
for the space of their dinner-hour they had the right to the effect of
aristocratic society, which they were seeking, unmarred by one
discordant note. After that hour, let it be a cramped stall in the
orchestra of another theatre, or let it be an early bed in a cell of
their colossal columbary, yet they would have had their dinner-hour
when they shone primarily just like the paying guests in the finest
English hotel, and secondarily just like the non-paying guests at the
innumerable dinners of the nobility and gentry in a thousand private
houses in London.

Our aim is always high, and they would be right to aim at nothing
lower than this in their amateur dramatics. But here we have a question
which we have been holding back by main force from the beginning, and
which now persists in precipitating itself in our peaceful page. It is
a question which merits wider and closer study than we can give it, and
it will, we hope, find an answer such as we cannot supply in the wisdom
of the reader. It presented itself to the mind of Eugenio in a recent
experience of his at a famous seaside resort which does not remit its
charm even in the heart of winter, and which with the first tremor of
the opening spring allures the dweller among the sky-scrapers and the
subways with an irresistible appeal. We need not further specify the
place, but it is necessary to add that it draws not only the jaded or
sated New-Yorker, but the more eager and animated average of well-to-do
people from every part of their country who have got bored out with
their happy homes and want a few days' or a few weeks' change. One may
not perhaps meet a single distinguished figure on its famous promenade,
or at least more distinguished than one's own; with the best will in
the world to find such figures, Eugenio could count but three or four:
a tall, alert, correct man or two; an electly fashioned, perfectly
set-up, dominant woman or so, whose bearing expressed the supremacy of
a set in some unquestionable world. But there was obvious riches
aplenty, and aplenty of the kind wholesomeness of the good, true,
intelligent, and heaven-bound virtue of what we must begin to call our
middle class, offensive as the necessity may be. Here and there the
effect of champagne in the hair, which deceived no one but the wearer,
was to be noted; here and there, high-rolling, a presence with the
effect of something more than champagne in the face loomed in the
perspective through the haze of a costly cigar. But by far, immensely
far, the greater number of his fellow-frequenters of the charming
promenade were simple, domestic, well-meaning Americans like Eugenio
himself, of a varying simplicity indeed, but always of a simplicity.
They were the stuff with which his fancy (he never presumed to call it
his imagination) had hitherto delighted to play, fondly shaping out of
the collective material those lineaments and expressions which he hoped
contained a composite likeness of his American day and generation. The
whole situation was most propitious, and yet he found himself moving
through it without one of the impulses which had been almost lifelong
with him. As if in some strange paralysis, some obsession by a demon of
indifference unknown before, he was bereft of the will to realize these
familiar protagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of course; he
knew them all too well; but he had not the wish to fit the likest of
them with phrases, to costume them for their several parts, to fit them
into the places in the unambitious action where they had so often
contributed to the modest but inevitable catastrophe.

The experience repeated itself till he began to take himself by the
collar and shake himself in the dismay of a wild conjecture. What had
befallen him? Had he gone along, young, eager, interested, delighted
with his kind for half a century of aesthetic consciousness, and now
had he suddenly lapsed into the weariness and apathy of old age? It is
always, short of ninety, too soon for that, and Eugenio was not yet
quite ninety. Was his mind, then, prematurely affected? But was not
this question itself proof that his mind was still importunately
active? If that was so, why did not he still wish to make his phrases
about his like, to reproduce their effect in composite portraiture?
Eugenio fell into a state so low that nothing but the confession of his
perplexity could help him out; and the friend to whom he owned his
mystifying, his all but appalling, experience did not fail him in his
extremity. No, he wrote back, it is not that you have seen all these
people, and that they offer no novel types for observation, but even
more that they illustrate the great fact that, in the course of the
last twenty years, society in America has reached its goal, has
'arrived,' and is creating no new types. On the contrary, it is
obliterating some of the best which were clearly marked, and is
becoming more and more one rich, dead level of mediocrity, broken here
and there by solitary eminences, some of which are genuine, some only
false peaks without solid rock foundations.

Such a view of his case must be immediately and immensely consoling,
but it was even more precious to Eugenio for the suggestion from which
his fancynever imaginationbegan to play forward with the vivacity
of that of a youth of sixty, instead of a middle-aged man of
eighty-five. If all this were trueand its truth shone the more
distinctly from a ground of potential dissentwas not there the stuff
in the actual conditions from which a finer artist than he could ever
hope to be, now that the first glow of his prime was past, might
fashion an image of our decadence, or our arrest, so grandly, so
perfectly dull and uninteresting, that it would fix all the after-ages
with the sovereign authority of a masterpiece? Here, he tremblingly
glowed to realize, was opportunity, not for him, indeed, but for some
more modern, more divinely inspired lover of the mediocre, to eternize
our typelessness and establish himself among the many-millioned heirs
of fame. It had been easyhow easy it had been!to catch the likeness
of those formative times in which he had lived and wrought; but the
triumph and the reward of the new artist would be in proportion to the
difficulty of seizing the rich, self-satisfied, ambitionless, sordid
commonplace of a society wishing to be shut up in a steam-heated,
electric-lighted palace and fed fat in its exclusiveness with the
inexhaustible inventions of an overpaid chef. True, the strong, simple
days of the young republic, when men forgot themselves in the struggle
with the wild continent, were past; true, the years were gone when the
tremendous adventure of tearing from her heart the iron and the gold
which were to bind her in lasting subjection gave to fiction industrial
heroes fierce and bold as those of classic fable or mediaeval romance.
But there remained the days of the years which shall apparently have no
end, but shall abound forever in an inexhaustible wealth of the sort
wishing not so much to rise itself as to keep down and out all
suggestion of the life from which it sprang.

The sort of type which would represent this condition would be
vainly sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He
would have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured
millions, which would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the
world we mean is indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction
seeking to portray its fads and characters must not have more than two
or three millions at the most. He, or better she, were better perhaps
with only a million, or a million and a half, or enough to live
handsomely in eminent inns, either at home or abroad, with that sort of
insolent half-knowledge to which culture is contemptible; which can
feel the theatre, but not literature; which has passed from the horse
to the automobile; which has its moral and material yacht, cruising all
social coasts and making port in none where there is not a hotel or
cottage life as empty and exclusive as its own. Even in trying to
understate the sort, one overstates it. Nothing could be more untrue to
its reality than the accentuation of traits which in the arrivals of
society elsewhere and elsewhen have marked the ultimation of the
bourgeois spirit. Say that the Puritan, the Pilgrim, the Cavalier, and
the Merchant Adventurer have come and gone; say that the Revolutionist
Patriot, the Pioneer and the Backwoodsman and the Noble Savage have
come and gone; say that the Slaveholder and the Slave and the
Abolitionist and the Civil Warrior have come and gone; say that the
Miner, the Rancher, the Cowboy, and the sardonically humorous
Frontiersman have come and gone; say that the simple-hearted,
hard-working, modest, genial Homemakers have come and gone; say that
the Captain of Industry has come and gone, and the world-wide Financier
is going: what remains for actuality-loving art to mould into shapes of
perdurable beauty? Obviously, only the immeasurable mass of a
prosperity sunken in a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and
unmoved by desire. But is that a reason why art should despair? Rather
it is a reason why it should rejoice in an opportunity occurring not
more than once in the ages to seize the likeness and express the
significance of Arrival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do
this, art must refine and re-refine upon itself; it must use methods of
unapproached delicacy, of unimagined subtlety and celerity. It is easy
enough to catch the look of the patrician in the upper air, of the
plebeian underfoot, but to render the image of a world-bourgeoisie,
compacted in characters of undeniable verisimilitude, that will be
difficult, but it will be possible, and the success will be of an
effulgence such as has never yet taken the eyes of wonder.

We should not be disposed to deny the artist, dedicated to this high
achievement by his love of the material not less than by his peculiar
gift, the range of a liberal idealism. We would not have him bound by
any precedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he should see
his work as a mighty historical picture, or series of such pictures, we
should not gainsay him his conception or bind him rather to any
genre result. We ourselves have been evolving here the notion of
some large allegory which should bear the relation to all other
allegories that Bartholdi's colossus of Liberty bears to all other
statues, and which should carry forward the story and the hero, or the
heroine, to some such supreme moment as that when, amid the approving
emotion of an immense hotel dining-room, all in decolletee and
frac pare, the old, simple-lived American, wearing a sack-coat and
a colored shirt, shall be led out between the eminent innkeeper and the
head waiter and delivered over to the police to be conducted in
ignominy to the nearest Italian table d'hote. The national character,
on the broad level of equality which fiction once delighted to paint,
no longer exists, but if a deeper, a richer, a more enduring monotony
replaces it, we have no fear but some genius will arrive and impart the
effect of the society which has arrived.

As Eugeniowe will call him Eugenio: a fine impersonal namegrew
older, and became, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely known
for his writings, he found himself increasingly the subject of appeal
from young writers who wished in their turn to become, rightfully or
wrongfully, more and more widely known. This is not, indeed, stating
the case with the precision which we like. His correspondents were
young enough already, but they were sometimes not yet writers; they had
only the ambition to be writers. Our loose formulation of the fact,
however, will cover all its meaning, and we will let it go that they
were young writers, for, whether they were or not, they all wished to
know one thing: namely, how he did it.

What, they asked in varying turns, was his secret, his recipe for
making the kind of literature which had made him famous: they did stint
their phrase, and they said famous. That always caused Eugenio to
blush, at first with shame and then with pleasure; whatever one's
modesty, one likes to be called famous, and Eugenio's pleasure in their
flatteries was so much greater than his shame that he thought only how
to return them the pleasure unmixed with the shame. His heart went out
to those generous youths, who sometimes confessed themselves still in
their teens, and often of the sex which is commonly most effective with
the fancy while still in its teens. It seemed such a very little thing
to show them the way to do what he had done, and, while disclaiming any
merit for it, to say why it was the best possible way. If they had
grouped him with other widely known writers in their admiration, he
never imagined directing his correspondents to those others' methods;
he said to himself that he did not understand them, and at bottom he
felt that it would have been better taste in the generous youths to
have left them out of the question.

In the end he never answered his correspondents in the handsome way
he had fancied. Generally he did not answer them at all, or, if he did,
he put them off with some such cheap excuse as advising them to be sure
they had something to say, and then to say it as simply and clearly as
they could. He knew very well that this was begging the question; that
the question was how to be artistic, graceful, charming, and whatever
else they said he himself was. If he was aware of not being all that,
he was aware also of having tried to be it; of having sought from the
beginning to captivate the reader's fancy as well as convince his
reason. He had never been satisfied with being plain and direct; he had
constantly wished to amuse as well as edify, and following the line of
beauty, as that of the least resistance, had been his practice if not
his precept. If he counselled his correspondents otherwise, he would be
uncandid, and when he had imagined putting them off in that fashion he
was more ashamed than he had been with their praise.

Yet, upon reflection, he perceived that what they asked was
impossible. If ever he had a formula he had lost it; he was no longer
in his own secret, if ever he had been. All that he could have said
with perfect honesty would have been that he had never found any royal
road to literature; that to his experience there was not even a common
highway; that there were only byways; private paths over other people's
grounds; easements beaten out by feet that had passed before, and
giving by a subsequent overgrowth of turf or brambles a deceitful sense
of discovery to the latest-comer.

His correspondents would not have liked that. He knew that what they
wanted was his measure of the old success in some new way, which they
could feel their own after it had been shown them. But the only secret
that he was still in was the very open one of working hard at whatever
he had in hand, and this he suspected they would have scorned sharing
with him. He could have said that if you want to keep three or five
balls in the air at once you must learn how by practising; but they
knew that as well as he; what they asked was being enabled to do it
themselves from his having practised.

The perception of this fact made Eugenio very sad, and he asked
himself if the willingness to arrive only after you had got there had
gone out of the world and left nothing but the ambition to be at this
point or that without the trouble of having reached it. He smiled as he
recalled the stock criticism of the connoisseur in The Vicar of
Wakefield, that the picture would have been better if the painter
had taken more pains; but he did not smile gayly: there seemed to him a
sum of pathetic wisdom in the saying which might well weigh down the
blithest spirit. It had occurred to him in connection with an old essay
of Hazlitt's, which he had been reading, on the comparative methods of
English and French painters in their work. The essayist held, almost
literally, that the French pictures were better because the French
painters had taken more pains, and taken especial pains in the least
interesting parts of their pictures. He was dealing more specifically
with copying, but his words applied to the respective schools in their
highest work, and he could only save his patriotic pride, so far as he
might, by saying: Courage is pure will without regard to consequences,
and this the English have in perfection. Poetry is our element, for the
essence of poetry is will and passion. The English fail as a people in
the fine arts, namely, because the end with them absorbs the means.

Eugenio knew nothing practically and very little theoretically of
painting; but it appeared to him that what Hazlitt said was of equal
force with respect to the fine art of literature; and that in his own
American field the English race failed, as far as it had failed, for
the same reason as that given by Hazlitt for its failure in painting.
In his mind he went further than Hazlitt, or came short of him, in
refusing the consolation of our race's superiority in poetry because it
was will and passion. As far as they had excelled in that, it was
because they had tried hard and not neglected the means for the end.
Where they had excelled most, it was quite imaginable that the poem
would still have been better if the poet had taken more pains. In the
case of prose, he thought we failed of the end because we were
impatient of the means, and as elderly men will, he accused the present
of being more hasty and indifferent to form than the past. He recalled
the time when he was apprentice in the art in which he could not yet
call himself a master workman, and thought how he tried to make what he
did beautiful, and fashioned his work with tireless pains after some
high model. Perhaps the young writers of this time were striving as
earnestly; but he could not see it, or thought he could not. He fancied
their eyes dazzled by the images of easy success, instead of taken with
the glory of a thing beautifully done. He remembered, with fond
emotion, how once his soul had glowed over some cunning'st pattern of
excelling nature, and had been filled with longing to learn from it
the art of surprising some other mood or aspect of nature and making
that loveliness or grandeur his own. He had talked with other youths
who were trying at the same time to do good work, and he remembered
that they too were trying in the same way; and now, long after, he
fancied that their difference from the youth of the present day was in
their willingness to strive for perfection in the means and to let the
end take care of itself. The end could no more justify bad means in
aesthetics than in ethics; in fact, without the carefully studied means
there could be no artistic result. If it was true that the young
writers of the present expected a high result from hurried or neglected
processes, they could have only the results that Eugenio saw around
him. If they admired these, and were coming to him for the secret of
achieving them, they were coming to the wrong shop.

Yet he did not harshly blame them. He remembered how he, too, when
he had been impatient of the means, had once fancied postponing them to
the end. That was in the days which were mainly filled for him with the
business of writing fiction, and when the climax of his story seemed
always threatening to hide itself from him or to elude his grasp. There
were times when it changed to some other end or took a different
significance from that it had primarily had. Then he had said to
himself that if he could only write the end first, or boldly block it
out as it first presented itself, and afterward go back and write in
the events and characters leading up to it, he would have an effect
glorified by all the fervor of his primal inspiration. But he never did
that, or even tried to do it. Perhaps, when he came to consider it more
carefully, it appeared impossible; perhaps it approved itself
ridiculous without experiment. His work of art, such as it was, was a
growth from all his thinking and feeling about it; and without that it
could no more eventuate in a climax than a tree could ripen fruit
without the preliminaries of striking its roots into the ground, coming
of the age to bear, and then some springtime budding, putting out
leaves, breaking into blossom, and setting its young apples, or
whatever else it was going to bear. The fruit it bore would be
according to its kind, and he might have been mistakenly expecting to
grow peaches from an apple stock when he was surprised to find apples
on it, or the end of his novel turning out other than he had forecast
it.

In literature the reader's affair is with results, but the author's
with processes. Eugenio had realized this more and more distinctly,
and, as he now reflected on the appeals of those fond young
correspondents of his, it occurred to him that their confusion as to
literary methods and manners lay in their being still readers so
largely and so little authors as yet. They were dealing with the end,
in their mistaken minds, and not with the means, as they supposed. The
successes which dazzled them might very well have been written backward
in some such fashion as he had once imagined, for the end was the main
thing with them, and was the end of the story as well as the end of the
book. But the true story never ends. The close of the book is simply
the point at which the author has stopped, and, if he has stopped
wisely, the reader takes up the tale and goes on with it in his own
mind.

As for the variance of the close from the forecast of it, Eugenio
was less and less dismayed by that, when in the course of time he
looked more closely at his own life and the lives of other men. Only on
some spiritual terms was there the fulfilment of forecast in them, and
the more art resembled life the less responsive it was to any
hard-and-fast design. He perceived that to find the result changing
from the purpose might very well be a proof of vitality in it, an
evidence of unconscious insight, the sort of inspiration that comes to
crown faithful work with unimagined beauty. He looked round at the
great works of literary art, and he believed that he saw in them the
escape from implicit obedience to a first intention. Only in the
inferior things, the mechanical things, could he discern obedience. In
something supreme, like Hamlet, say, there was everything to
make him think that the processes had educated Shakespeare as to the
true nature of his sublime endeavor and had fixed the terms of its
close. Probably the playwright started with the notion of making Hamlet
promptly kill his stepfather, rescue Ophelia from the attempt to climb
out over the stream on a willow branch, forgive his erring mother as
more sinned against than sinning, welcome Laertes back to Denmark, and
with the Ghost of his father blessing the whole group, and Polonius
with his arm in a sling, severely but not fatally wounded, form the
sort of stage picture, as the curtain went down, that has sent
audiences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so many theatres. But
Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well as a playwright, learned from
Hamlet himself that Hamlet could not end as he had meant him to end.
Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and, in the sort of
anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must rise from death,
another and a truer ghost than the buried majesty of Denmark, and walk
the world forever.

Could Eugenio, however, advise his youthful correspondents to work
so reckless of their original conceptions as Shakespeare had probably
done? The question was serious; it put him upon his conscience, and he
decided that at the most he could not do more than urge them, with all
the earnestness of his nature, to write their Hamlets from the
beginning forward, and never from the ending backward, even in their
own minds. He saw that if he were to answer them collectively (and he
certainly did not intend to answer them severally) he must say that
their only hope of producing an effective whole was through
indefatigable work upon every part. Make each smallest detail
beautiful, and despise none because it seemed to perform a poor and
lowly office in the assemblage of the parts. Let these youths be sure
that they could not know the meaning of any design from imagining it,
but only from expressing it, and that the true result could come only
from the process. They could not hope to outdo Shakespeare and foreknow
their respective Hamlets; they must slowly make their Hamlets
' acquaintance by living with them.

If Eugenio's correspondents were dashed by this hard saying, he
thought he might raise their spirits by adding that they would find
compensation for their slow, arduous toil in particulars from a fact
which he had noted in his own case. A thing well done looks always very
much better in the retrospect than could have been hoped. A good piece
of work would smile radiantly upon them when it was accomplished.
Besides, after a certain experience in doing, they would learn that the
greatest happiness which could come to them from their work would be
through the perfecting of details. This would make their performance a
succession of little victories which alone could constitute the great
ultimate triumph.

But style, but style! they might return. What about style? That
was one of the miracles we asked you the sleight of, and are you going
to say nothing about that? Or did you mean style, in your talk about
perfecting details? Do you want us to take infinite pains in acquiring
a style?

By no means, Eugenio was prepared to declare in the event of this
come-back. Do not think about style. If you do your work well,
patiently, faithfully, truly, style will infallibly be added unto you.
That is the one thing you must not try for. If you try for
style, you will be like a man thinking about his clothes or his
manners. You will be self-conscious, which is the fatal opposite of
being yourself. You will be yourself when you are lost in your work,
and then you will come into the only style that is proper to you: the
beauty and the grace that any sort of workman has in the exercise of
his craft. You will then have, without seeking it, your own swing of
phrase, your own turn of expression, your own diction, and these will
be your style by which every reader will know you. But if you have a
manner which you have borrowed or imitated, people will see that it is
second-hand and no better than something shop-worn or cast off.
Besides, style is a thing that has been grossly overvalued in the
general appraisal of literary qualities. The stylists are not the
greatest artists, the supreme artists. Who would think of Shakespeare
as a stylist, or Tolstoy, or Dante?

Eugenio thought he could count upon a vanity in his correspondents
so dense as not to be pierced by any irony. In fact, it could not be
said that, though he felt the pathos of their appeals, he greatly
respected the motives which actuated them in writing to him. They
themselves respected their motives because they did not know them as he
did, but probably they did not pity themselves so much as he pitied
them. He realized that they turned to him from a literary remoteness
which they did not realize, and it was very natural that they should
turn for help outside their circumstance; but Eugenio had not lived to
his age without learning that many natural impulses are mistaken if not
wrong. He reflected sadly that those far-off solitaries could alone
burst their circumstance and find their way out of it. He perceived
that they could do this only by their own devout and constant toil in
the line of their aspiration. But would it avail to tell them so?

One of the knowledges of a period of life which we will call the
riper maturity is that we need all the accumulated vigilance of the
past to secure us from the ever-besetting dangers of the present: the
dangers of indolence, of slovenly performance, of indistinct vision, of
weakening conscience in our work. We need every atom of force, every
particle of the stored electricity of youth, to keep us going in later
years. While we are still young we are aware of an environing and
pervading censure, coming from the rivalry, the envy, the generous
emulation, the approval, the disapproval, the love, the hate of all
those who witness our endeavor. No smallest slip, no slightest defect
will be lost upon this censure, equally useful whether sympathetic or
antipathetic. But as we grow old we are sensible of a relaxing, a
lifting, a withdrawal of the environing and pervading censure. We have
become the objects of a compassionate toleration or a contemptuous
indifference; it no longer matters greatly to the world whether we do
our work well or ill. But if we love our work as we ought till we die,
it should matter more than ever to us whether we do it well or ill. We
have come to the most perilous days of our years when we are tempted
not so much to slight our work as to spare our nerves, in which the
stored electricity is lower and scanter than it was, and to let a
present feeble performance blight the fame of strenuous achievements in
the past. We may then make our choice of two thingsstop working; stop
going, cease to move, to existor gather at each successive effort
whatever remains of habit, of conscience, of native force, and put it
into effect till our work, which we have not dropped, drops us.

Should Eugenio address these hard sayings to his appealing, his
palpitating correspondents? He found himself on the point of telling
them that of all the accumulated energies which could avail them when
they came of his age, or were coming of it, there was none that would
count for so much as the force of habit; and what could be more banal
than that? It would not save it from banality if he explained that he
meant the habit of loving the very best one can do, and doing that and
not something less. It would still be banal to say that now in their
youth was the only time they would have to form the habit of tirelessly
doing their best at every point, and that they could not buy or beg or
borrow such a habit for the simple reason that nobody who had it could
sell or give or lend it.

Besides, as Eugenio very well perceived, his correspondents were not
only young now, but were always intending to be so. He remembered how
it used to be with himself, and that was how it used to be. He saw
abundance of old, or older, people about him, but he himself
instinctively expected to live on and on, without getting older, and to
hive up honey from experience without the beeswax which alone they
seemed to have stored from the opening flowers of the past. Yet, in due
course of time, he found himself an old or older man simply through
living on and on and not dying earlier. Upon the whole, he liked it and
would not have gone back and died earlier if he could. But he felt that
it would be useless trying to convince his youthful correspondents
that, whether they liked it or not, they too would grow old, or older,
if they lived. How, then, teach them by precept, if they would not
learn by universal example, that unless they were to be very miserable
old men, and even miserable old women, they must have the habit of
work? How instruct them further that unless they had the habit of good
work, patient, faithful, fine work, the habit which no one can buy,
beg, or borrow, because no one can sell, give, or lend it, they were
worse than idle, cumberers of the earth, with no excuse for being above
it?

If he had set out to do that, they might have retorted upon him that
he was making a petty personal matter of art, which was not only so
much longer than life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this
event he saw that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his
correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art
was a personal matter, and that though longer, it was not wider,
deeper, or higher than life, and could not be. It might be mysterious
in being personal, but it was not necessarily petty. It would be great
if the artist was so, but not otherwise; it could be fine on no other
terms. There was a theory and an appearance that it existed somehow
apart from the artist and that it made him. But the fact was he made
it, partly wittingly, partly unwittingly; and it had no being except in
his achievement. The power of imagining a work of art was the gift of
nature, as being long or short, dark or fair was. The concern of him it
was given to was how, after he found it out, to make the most of his
gift. It had no power to make much or little of him. If he cherished it
and served it, when he had made sure of it, by fulfilling the law that
its possession imposed, then it would rise up in something he had done
and call him master.

But how could Eugenio make such thingsso true and yet so
self-contradictory, so mutually repellentclear to these
simple-hearted young correspondents of his? The more he thought of the
matter, the more he resolved to do nothing about it.

It was the experience of Eugenio that the criticisms of his books,
when they were unfriendly, presented a varying offence, rather than a
cumulative offence, as the years wore on. The criticisms of one's books
are always hard to bear if they are unfavorable, but he thought that
displeasure for displeasure the earlier refusal to allow him certain
merits was less displeasing than the later consent to take these merits
for granted. To be taken for granted in any wise is to be limited. It
is tantamount to having it said of one that, yes, one has those
virtues, but one has no others. It comes also to saying that one has,
of course, the defects of one's virtues; though Eugenio noted that,
when certain defects of his were taken for granted, it did not so
distinctly and immediately follow that he was supposed to have the
virtues of these.

Now, Eugenio's theory of himself was that he was not limited, and
that, if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he
chose. He had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not
like being told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the
same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy
play he was culling flowers of such familiar tint and scent that they
seemed to be the very flowers he had picked thirty or forty years
before. What made it harder to endure suggestion of this sort was that
in his feeling of always breaking new ground there was an inner sense,
or fear, or doubt, that perhaps it was not really virgin soil he was
turning up, but merely the sod of fields which had lain fallow a year
or two or had possibly been cropped the season before.

The misgiving was forced upon him by certain appearances in the work
of other veteran authors. When he took up the last book of some
lifelong favorite, no matter how great a master he knew him still to
be, he could not help seeing that the poor old master was repeating
himself, though he would not have phrased the case in such brutal
terms. Then the chill wonder how long he could hope to escape the like
fate pierced him, and for a moment he could not silence the question
whether it might not have already befallen him. In another moment he
knew better, and was justly aggrieved with the next reviewer who took
things in him for granted, quite as offensively if they were merits as
if they were defects. It was vital to him to be always breaking new
ground, and, if at times it seemed to him that he had turned this or
that furrow before, he said to himself that it was merely one of those
intimations of pre-existence which are always teasing us here with the
sense of experience in circumstances absolutely novel; and he hoped
that no one else would notice the coincidence.

He was, indeed, tolerably safe from the chance, for it is one of the
conditions of literary criticism that the reviewers shall be nearly
always young persons. They, if they alone are capable of the cruelties
they sometimes practise, are alone capable of the enthusiasms which
supply publishers with quotable passages for their advertisements, and
which lift authors' hearts in pride and joy. It is to their advantage
that they generally bring to the present work of a veteran author an
ignorance of all that he has done before, and have the zest for it
which the performance of a novice inspires. They know he is not a
novice, of course, and they recognize his book as that of a veteran,
but they necessarily treat it as representative of his authorship. Of
course, if it is his twentieth or thirtieth book, or his fortieth or
fiftieth, it is merely one of a long series which fully represents him.
Even these collectively represent him inadequately as long as he is
adding to them, if he has the habit, like Eugenio, of always breaking
new ground. The reviewer, however, is probably much newer than the
ground which the established author breaks in his last book, and,
coming to it in his generous ignorance, which he has to conceal under a
mask of smiling omniscience, he condemns or praises it without
reference to the work which has gone before it and which it is merely
part of, though of course it has entirety enough of a sort to stand
alone. If the author has broken ground in the direction of a new type
of heroine, the reviewer, by the conditions of his calling, is all but
obliged to say that here is one of those enchanting girls whom the
author in question has endeared to generations of readers; or one of
those tedious prudes for whom his name is a synonyme. If, after many
psychological romances, the author has stepped down to the level of
actual life, he is praised or blamed for the vital or servile
naturalism of his work; or if the contrary is the case, he has to read
of himself as doing something habitual and entirely characteristic of
him. In vain, so far as that acute young critic is concerned, has he
broken new ground. But if he has with much compunction consciously
turned his furrows in a field tilled before, he stands a fair chance of
being hailed at the outset of a new career.

He cannot openly complain, and if he could the critic cannot help
being what he is. If the critic were older and more versed in the
veteran author, he might not like him so well, and he could not, at any
rate, bring the fresh interest to his work which the young reviewer
brings. What Eugenio would really wish would be to have each successive
book of his given for review to some lifelong admirer, some dear and
faithful friend, all the better for not being an acquaintance, who had
liked him from the beginning and was intimately versed in all his work.
Such a critic would know that Eugenio was always breaking new ground,
and that he was never more true to this inherent tendency than when he
seemed to be ploughing the same old furrows in the same old fields.
Such a critic would be alert to detect those fine differences of
situation which distinguish a later from an earlier predicament. He
would note with unfailing perspicacity the shades of variance which
constitute Florindo an essentially novel character when presented under
the name of Lindoro, or Floribella a fresh delight when she reappears
as Doralinda. Even when he could not deny that these persons were in
themselves one and the same, he would be able to make the reader
observe that the new light thrown upon them by the author's
ever-renascent art revealed in familiar creations traits of mind and
charms of spirit unimagined before. He would insist that, if not new,
they were newer, because being more fully ascertained they were truer.
He would boldly recur to the personages in Eugenio's former books whom
they reminded one of, and, studying them in contrast, would convince
the reader that the increasing purpose of the author in the treatment
of the well-known types had been to reveal the infinite variety of
character which lay hid in each and every human type.

Some such reviewer, Eugenio thought, all journals pretending to
literary authority ought to keep on their staff for the comfort of
veteran authors and for the dispensation of that more delicate and
sympathetic justice which their case required. It might be well enough
to use a pair of ordinary steelyards, or even hay-scales, in weighing
out the rewards and punishments of younger authors, but some such
sensitive balance as only the sympathetic nerves of equal years, and,
if possible, equal intelligence, could adjust ought to be used in
ascertaining the merits of a veteran author.

In his frankest self-consciousness, Eugenio did not say a veteran
author like himself, and he did not insist exclusively upon a veteran
critic for his behoof. There were times when he thought that a young
critic, coming in the glow of adolescence and the freshness of
knowledge won from the recent study of all his works, might be better
fitted to appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the
notion, when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played,
of an author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of
its immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one
really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the
invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who
invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it
so well. But though he would not have liked to be his own reviewer,
because it was not seemly, he chiefly feared that if put upon his
honor, as he would be in such a case, he must deal with his work so
damagingly as to leave little or nothing of it. He might make the
reputation of a great critic, but in doing execution upon his own
shortcomings he might be the means of destroying himself as a great
author.

After all, authors are not the self-satisfied generation they must
often seem to the public which has tried to spoil them with praise.
There is much in doing a thing which makes a man modest in regard to
the way he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it well, if
the testimony of all his faculties is to that effect, there is somehow
the lurking sense that it was not he who really did it, but that there
is a power, to turn Matthew Arnold's phrase to our use, not ourselves,
that works for beauty as well as righteousness, and that it was this
mystical force which wrought through him to the exquisite result. If
you come to the second-best results, to the gold so alloyed that you
may confidently stamp it your own, do you wish to proclaim it the
precious metal without alloy? Do you wish to declare that it is to all
intents and purposes quite as good as pure gold, or even better? Do you
hold yourself quit of the duty of saying that it is second-best, that
it is something mixed with copper or nickel, and of the value of
oroide, say? You cannot bring yourself to this extreme of candor, and
what right, then, have you to recognize that something else is fine
gold when it is really so? Ought not you to feign that it is only about
thirteen carats when it is actually eighteen?

Considerations like these always stayed Eugenio when it came to the
point of deciding whether he would care to be his own reviewer, but the
desire to be adequately reviewed still remained with him, a fond
longing amid repeated disappointments. An author often feels that he
has got too much praise, though he never has got all he wants. Why
don't they clap? Doctor Holmes once whimsically demanded, speaking of
his audiences in those simple early days when he went about lecturing
like Emerson and Alcott and other saints and sages of New England. Do
they think I can't stand it? Why don't they give me three times three?
I can stand it very well. An author may sometimes think he is
fulsomely praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab
adulation trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being
accused of insincerity. He may confidently count upon being regarded as
a fine fellow who has at worst gone wrong in the right direction. It
ought, therefore, to be a very simple matter to content a veteran
author in the article of criticism, but somehow it is not.

Perhaps the trouble is in the nature of criticism, which,
unwillingly enough, no doubt, assumes to be and to do more than it can.
Its convention is that it is an examination of a book and a report upon
its qualities. But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the
limits assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits with the
reader. The author would not mind if the critic's report were
physically commensurate with his book; but, of course, the reader could
not stand that; and, generous as they are, other authors might
complain. Sometimes, as it is, they think that any one of their number
who gets something like a good report from a critic is getting more
than his deserts. Yet authors, though a difficult, are not an
impossible generation. Few of them would allow that they are even
unreasonable with regard to criticism, and they would probably hail any
improvement in its theories and methods with gratitude.

As criticism cannot be an adequate report upon the qualities of a
book, even a book which has not been examined, why should it assume to
do more than talk about it and talk all the better for being merely
tentative and altogether unfinal? Nobody can really be authoritative
concerning anything, for there is no one whose wisdom will not be
disputed by others of the wise. The best way, then, might be for a
reviewer to go round collecting sentiment and opinion about the book he
means to talk of, and then to give as many qualifying varieties of
impression as the general unhandsomeness of human nature will allow him
to give when they differ from his own impression. On the terms of the
old and still accepted convention of criticism, Eugenio had himself
done a vast deal of reviewing, an amount of it, in fact, that he could
not consider without amaze, and in all this reviewing he had not once
satisfied himself with his work. Never once had he written a criticism
which seemed to him adequate, or more than an approximation to justice,
even when he had most carefully, almost prayerfully, examined the work
he reported upon. He was aware of writing from this mood or that, of
feeling hampered by editorial conditions, of becoming impatient or
jaded, and finally employing the hay-scales when he ought to have used
the delicate balances with which one weighs out life-giving elixirs or
deadly poisons. But he used to imagine that if he could have put
himself in the attitude of easy discussion or light comment, instead of
the judicial pose he felt obliged to take, he could have administered a
far finer and more generous measure of justice. In these moments he
used to wonder whether something stated and organized in the way of
intelligent talk about books might not be substituted for the
conventional verdicts and sentences of the courts of criticism.

In this notion he proceeded upon a principle evolved from his own
experience in fields far from the flinty and sterile ranges of
criticism. He had not only done much reviewing in those days, but he
had already written much in the kinds which he could not, in his
modesty, bring himself to call creative, though he did not mind
others calling it so. Whatever had been the shortcomings of the
conventional reports upon his work, it was his glad experience that
nothing he said or meant, not the slightest intention or airiest
intimation in his books, was ever wholly lost. Somewhere, some one,
somehow had caught it, liked it, remembered it, and had by a happy
inspiration written him of it, it might be diffident, it might be
confident, of his pleasure in the recognition.

Such recognition was always more precious than the reports of the
conventional critics, though if these were favorable the author was
glad of them, as of any good that the gods gave. But what struck
Eugenio was that such recognition was the real, the very, the vital
criticism, and that if it could be evoked in behalf of others, in its
sincerity, it might be helpful to the cause of literature far beyond
anything that the courts of criticism could do or effect in its behalf.
After all, as he said to himself, an author wrote for his readers and
not for his critics, for pleasure and not for judgment; and if he could
be assured publicly, as he sometimes was assured privately, that
nothing he did was lost, he might be encouraged to keep on doing his
best. Why, indeed, should not there be a critical journal embodying in
a species of fragrant bouquet the flowers of thought and emotion
springing up in the brains and bosoms of readers responsive to the
influence of a new book? Such readers would have only to suppose
themselves addressing the author direct, and the thing could be done.
It might be done in another way by the authors contributing the praises
privately sent him. In a time when personal letters to authors are
constantly quoted in advertisements, this might not seem so immodest as
in some earlier literary condition.

In the mean time the question of what shall be done for veteran
authors who are always breaking new ground still remains, and it is
complicated by a fact of psychological import for the reader as well as
the author. What first gives an author his hold upon the reader is not
the novelty of his theme, but a pleasing, it may be a painfully
pleasing, quality which in its peculiar variation must be called his
personal quality. It is the sense of this in each of his successive
books which deepens his hold upon the reader, and not the style, or the
characters, or the intrigue. As long as this personal quality delights,
he is new whether he breaks new ground or not, or he is newly welcome.
With his own generation, with the readers who began young with him and
have grown old with him, he is always safe. But there is danger for him
with the readers who begin young with him after he has grown old. It is
they who find his tales twice told and himself hackneyed, unless they
have been trained to like his personal quality by their elders. This
might be difficult, but it is not impossible, and ought not it to be
the glad, the grateful care of such elders?

All forms of literature probably hold a great deal more meaning than
people commonly get out of them; but prose may be likened to a cup
which one can easily see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper
and fuller than it looks; while verse is the fount through which
thought and feeling continually bubble from the heart of things. The
sources that underlie all life may be finding vent in a rhyme where the
poet imagined he was breathing some little, superficial vein of his
own; but in the reader he may unawares have reached the wells of inmost
passion and given them release. The reader may himself live with a
certain verse and be aware of it now and then merely as a teasing
iterance that

From some odd corner of the mind
Beats time to nothing in the brain.

But suddenly some experience, or perhaps the exfoliation of the
outer self through the falling away of the withered years, shall open
to him its vital and cosmical significance. He shall know then that it
is not an idle whisper of song, but a message to his soul from the
senate where the immortals gather in secular counsel and muse the
wisdom of all the centuries since humanity came to its earliest
consciousness. The bearer of the message may not have known it in the
translation which it wears to the receiver; each must read it in his
own tongue and read meaning into it; perhaps it always takes two to
make a poet, and singer and listener are the twin spheres that form one
star.

A valued correspondent of ours, one of those whose letters are
oftener than we should like to own fraught with the suggestion of our
most fortunate inspirations, believes himself to have been recently the
confidant of the inner sense of certain lines in a familiar poem of
Longfellow's. Its refrain had, from the first reading, chanted in the
outer chamber of his ear, but suddenly, the other day, it sang to his
soul with a newly realized purport in the words,

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

The words are, as the poet promptly declares, the burden of a
Lapland song, which is haunting his memory still, which murmurs and
whispers still, which is singing and saying still, which is
mournful and sweet and fitful and fatal and strange and
beautiful. Yet he seems not to have known, as our friend now thinks
he himself knows, that they express a difference, unrecognized
hitherto, between youth and age, and rightfully attribute to the young
a steadfastness and persistence in objects and ideals formerly supposed
the distinguishing qualities of the old. In other words, they have
precipitated into his consciousness a truth unwittingly held in
solution by both the poets in their verse. Or, if it was conveyed to
him by their sensible connivance, he is the first who has been made its
repository. Or, if he cannot claim an exclusive property in the
revelation, it is now his, in his turn, by that sad right of seniority
whose advantages are not ours till there are few or none left to
contest them with us. One has not been promoted to them because of any
merit or achievement; one has simply lived into them; and how much of
one has died in the process of survival! The lines speak to our
friend's age a language which his youth could not have understood, and
it is because he is no longer young that he perceives how long the
thoughts of youth were and how brief the thoughts of age.

He had always fancied that his later years should be a time of
repose in the faiths, loves, and joys through which he realized
himself. But nothing apparently was farther from the fact. Such length
of thoughts as he had, such abiding pleasures, such persistent hopes,
were from his youth; and the later sort were as the leaves of the tree
to the tree itself. He put them forth at the beginning of an epoch, a
season, and they dropped from him at the close. In as great bitterness
as is consonant with his temperament he has asked us why youth should
ever have been deemed fickle and age constant when so precisely the
contrary is true. Youth, he owns, is indeed full of vain endeavors and
of enterprises that come to nothing, but it is far more fixed than age
in its aspirations. His aspirations change now with such rapidity that
they seem different not only from year to year, but from month to
month, from day to day. He has not merely discarded his old ideals, he
loathes them. He used to like going out to dinner, above all things;
and he was fond of lunches, even of afternoon teas; but in a day, in an
hour, such delights became wearinesses and vexations of spirit.
Formerly he enjoyed travel with all its necessary concomitants. It
amused him to check his baggage and depart from stations, to arrive at
hotels and settle himself in new rooms; the very domiciliation in
sleeping-cars or the domestication in diners had a charm which was
apparently perennial; a trip in a river-boat was rapture; an ocean
voyage was ecstasy. The succession of strange faces, new minds, was an
unfailing interest, and there was no occurrence, in or out of the
ordinary, which did not give him release from self and form a true
recreation. The theatre does not amuse him now, though the time has
been, and lately, for the curtain, when it rose on a play, new or old,
to lift his spirit with it and to hold him entranced till its fall. As
for the circus, he once rejoiced in all its feats; performing elephants
could not bore him, nor acts of horsemanship stale its infinite
variety. But the time has come abruptly when the smell of the sawdust,
or the odor of the trodden weed, mixed with the aroma of ice-cold
lemonade, is a stench in his nostrils.

These changes of ideal have occurred, not through the failure of any
powers that he can note in himself, but as part of the great change
from youth to age, which he thinks is far greater morally than
physically. He is still fairly strong; he has not lost his appetite or
the teeth to gratify it; he can walk his miles, always rather two than
ten, and rest refreshed from them; except that he does not like to kill
things, he could trudge the whole day through fields and woods with his
gun on his shoulder; though he does not golf, and cannot know whether
or no it would bore him, he likes to wield the axe and the scythe in
the groves and meadows of his summer place. When he stretches himself
on the breast of the mother alike of flesh and grass, it is with a
delicious sense of her restorative powers and no fear of rheumatism. If
he rests a little longer than he once used, he is much more rested when
he rises from his repose.

His body rejoices still in its experiences, but not his soul: it is
not interested; it does not care to have known its experiences or wish
to repeat them. For this reason he thinks that it is his spirit which
is superannuated, while its muddy vesture of decay is in very
tolerable repair. His natural man is still comparatively young, and
lives on in the long, long thoughts of youth; but his supernatural man
has aged, with certain moral effects which alarm his doubts of the
pleasures he once predicated of eternity. If it is going to be like
this with me! he says to himself, and shrinks from supplying the
responsive clause of his conditional.

But mainly his mind turns upon itself in contemplation of its
earthly metamorphoses, in which it hardly knows itself for the mind of
the same man. Its apprehensions are for the time when, having exhausted
all the differences, it shall care for none; but meanwhile it is
interested in noting the absurdity of that conventional view of age as
the period of fixed ideals. It may be the period of fixed habits, of
those helpless iterances which imply no intentions or purposes; but it
is not the period in which the mind continues in this or that desire
and strives for its fulfilment. The same poet who sang at second hand
those words of the Lapland song,

The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,

erred, to our friend's sense, in singing of

The young heart hot and restless,
And the old subdued and slow.

He believes the reverse would rightly characterize the heart of
youth and the heart of age. Age is not slow in its mental motions; it
is hurried and anxious, with that awful mystical apprehension of the
swift-coming moment when time shall be no more and nothing but eternity
shall be left. It is not subdued; its heart is hot with rebellion
against the inevitable. But for youth there is no inevitable; there is
no conclusion, no catastrophe, which it may not hope to escape; and, so
it is patient of chances, it is glad of them. Its heart is not
restless; it is quite at peace in the bosom which is secure of all the
time there is.

Our friend believes that a variety of popular superstitions will
fall at the recognition of the truth in this matter, and none more
finally than that which attributes to the junior partner the
unhappiness of those marriages in which youth and crabbed age try to
live together. In such hazardous unions the junior partner is, for some
unexplained reason, of the sex which has the repute of a generic
fickleness as well as the supposed volatility of its fewer years.
Probably repute wrongs it as much in one respect as in the other, but
our friend contends only for greater justice to it in the last. In the
light that he has come into, he holds that where such unions are
unhappy, though they may have been formed with a fair appearance of
affection, it is the senior partner who is to blame if blame may ever
be attached to involuntary change. It is the senior partner who has
wearied first of the companionship and wished for release with the
impatience natural to age. This is intolerant of the annoyances which
seem inherent in every union of the kind, and impatient of those
differences of temperament which tell far more than any disparities of
age, and which exist even where there are no such disparities. The
intolerance, the impatience, is not more characteristic of the husband
where he is the elder than of the wife in the much fewer instances of
her seniority. In the unions where two old people join their faltering
destinies, the risks of unhappiness are, logically, doubled; and our
friend holds it a grotesque folly to expect anything else of marriages
in which two lovers, disappointed of each other in their youth, attempt
to repair the loss in their age. Where any such survive into later
life, with the passion of earlier life still rife in their hearts, he
argues that they had much better remain as they are, for in such a
belated union as they aspire to the chances are overwhelmingly against
them.

Very probably, like other discoverers, he is too much impressed with
the value of his divination. It is something that, at any rate, can
appeal for recognition only to the aged or the aging. With these we
could imagine it bringing a certain consolation, a relief from vain
regret, an acquittal from self-accusation. If one has suddenly changed
for no apparent reason, one must be glad to find a reason in the
constitution of things, and to attribute one's fickleness to one's time
of life. Youth's errors have possibly been too much condoned upon
grounds where age could more justly base its defence. It may be more
reckless than age, but it is not nearly so rash. It keeps thinking its
long, long thoughts and questioning the conclusions to which age
eagerly hobbles or hurls itself from its crutches. Youth is deliberate,
for it has plenty of time, while, as our friend notes, age has little
but eternity before it. Not youth, but age, leaps from life's trolley
while it is still in motion, or, after mismeasuring the time and space,
limps impatiently before it and is rolled under its fender. You may see
physical proof of this difference, our friend insists, in the behavior
of two people, one young and one old, at any street-crossing; and why
should so many old ladies fall on the stairs, but that they are apt to
precipitate themselves wildly from landings where young girls linger to
dream yet one dream more before they glide slowly down to greet the
young men who would willingly wait years for them?

The distrust of eternity at which our friend hints is perhaps the
painfulest of his newly discovered differences between youth and age.
Resting so serenely as it does in practically unlimited time, with
ideals and desires which scarcely vary from year to year, youth has no
fears of infinity. It is not afraid but it shall have abundant
occupation in the aeons before it, or that its emotions or volitions
shall first be exhausted. Its blithe notion of immortality is that it
is immortal youth. It has no conception of age, and could not imagine
an eternity of accomplished facts. It is, perhaps, for this reason that
doubt of immortality never really comes to youth. One of the few things
which our friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals
honestly with his only history must be aware of an hour, almost a
moment, of waning youth, when the vague potentiality of disbelief
became a living doubt, thence-forward to abide with him till death
resolve it. Endless not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after
it endless being is unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable endless being is
all that is left to age, and it is in the notion of it alone that age
can get back to the long, long thoughts in which is surcease from
unrest. Our old friend may accuse us of proposing the most impossible
of paradoxes when we invite him to take refuge from his whirling
ideals, not in an unavailing endeavor to renew the conditions of youth
in time, but in the forecast of youth in eternity. We think that the
error of his impatience, his despair with the state he has come to
here, is largely if not wholly through his failure to realize that he
is not going to wake up old in some other being, but young, and that
the capacity of long, long thoughts will be renewed in him with the
renewal of his life. The restlessness of age, its fickleness, its
volatility, is the expression of immense fatigue. It tosses from side
to side and tries for this and that like a sick man from sheer
weakness; or, rather, if the reader prefers another image, it is like
some hapless wild thing caught by rising floods on a height of land
which they must soon submerge, and running incessantly hither and
thither as the water more narrowly hems it in.

Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has been increased
of late by the restriction of human hope to the years which remain, few
and brief to the longest earthly life, by the sciences which
provisionally darken counsel. When these shall have penetrated to a
point where they can discern the light, they will pour the day on the
dim orbs of age and illumine the future with new hope. Then doubting
age can enter into the rest now forbidden it and take its repose
between illimitable horizons in the long, long thoughts of eternal
youth. We speak here in behalf of the sceptic, the agnostic few. For
the many who have not lost their hope because they have never lost
their faith, doubtless all the trouble of change which disquiets our
friend will seem something temperamental merely, and not something
essential or inseparable from human nature. Their thoughts have
remained long, their ideals steadfast, because they have not lost the
most precious jewel of their youththe star of trust and hope which

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

These are the most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that
their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their
numbers have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a
paper by a man of that science which deals with life on strictly
physical lines, and drawing from it an immense consolation because it
reaffirmed that the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the
unthinkability of an automatic universe and the necessity of an
intentional first cause, but with Evolution, in the regard of some
scientists, tottering on its throne, and Natural Selection entering the
twilight into which the elder pagan deities have vanished, is newly
warranted in claiming existence as that indestructible life-property or
organizing power which characterizes kind through kind from everlasting
to everlasting. In this consolation we seemed well on our way back to
the encounter of a human spirit such as used to be rapt to heaven or
cast into hell for very disproportionate merits or demerits; but we
were supported for the meeting by the probability that in the fortunate
event the spirit would be found issuing from all the clouds of
superstition, and when it was reconstituted in the universal belief,
that the time, with eternity in its train, would have returned for
fitly hailing it in the apostrophe of the Addisonian Cato:

But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds.

There comes a time in the experience of perhaps every stated
purveyor of intellectual food when the stock he has long been drawing
upon seems finally exhausted. There is not a grain left in the barns
where he had garnered up the harvests of the past; there is not a head
of wheat to be found in the fields where he had always been able to
glean something; if he shakes the tree of knowledge in the hope of a
nut to crack or a frozen-thaw to munch, nothing comes down but a shower
of withered leaves. His condition is what, in the parlance of his
vocation, he calls being out of a subject, and it is what may happen to
him equally whether he is preaching twice a Sunday from the pulpit, or
writing leaders every day for a prominent journal, or merely
contributing a monthly essay to a magazine. As the day or hour or
moment approaches when he must give forth something from his
destitution, he envies the hungriest of his auditors or readers who do
not yet know that there is nothing in him to appease their famine.
There is only the barren will to give which only a miracle can
transform into a vitalizing bounty.

Yet is not this miracle always wrought? When did a pulpit ever fail
of a sermon, or a journal of a leading article, or a magazine of its
stated essay? The fact might argue the very contrary of the appearance
and convince the desperate purveyor that what he mistook for hopeless
need was choice which mocked him with a myriad alternatives. From cover
to cover the Scripture is full of texts; every day brings forth its
increase of incident; the moral and social and aesthetical world is
open on every side to polite inquiry and teems with inspiring
suggestion. If ever the preacher or editor or essayist fancies he has
exhausted these resources, he may well pause and ask whether it is not
himself that he has exhausted. There may be wanting the eye to see the
riches which lie near or far, rather than the riches which are always
inviting the eye.

A curious trait of the psychology of this matter is that it is
oftener the young eye than the old which lacks the visual force. When
Eugenio was beginning author and used to talk with other adolescent
immortals of the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of their high calling,
the dearth of subjects was the cause of much misgiving and even despair
among them. Upon a certain occasion one of that divine company, so much
diviner than any of the sort now, made bold to affirm: I feel that I
have got my technique perfect. I believe that my poetic art will stand
the test of any experiment in the handling of verse, and now all that I
want is a subject. It seemed a great hardship to the others, and they
felt it the more keenly because every one of them was more or less in
the same case. They might have none of them so frankly owned their
fitness for their work as the one who had spoken, but they were all as
deeply aware of it; and if any subject had appeared above the horizon
there could have been no question among them except as to which should
first mount his winged steed and ride it down. It did not occur to any
of them that the want of a subject was the defect of their art, and
that until they were equipped with the eye that never fails to see
occasion for song all round the heavens they were not yet the champions
of poetry which they fancied themselves. He who had uttered their
common belief sufficiently proved afterward, in the range of things he
did, that he had ultimately come into possession of the highest of the
poetic gifts, the poetic vision of life, and that he had completed his
art at a point where it had been most imperfect before, when he
supposed it so perfect. As soon as he ceased looking for subjects,
which were mainly the conventional themes of verse, the real and vital
subjects began looking for him.

Eugenio himself, on his lower level, had something of the same
experience. When he first began those inventions in prose which long
seemed to him worthy of the best that his kindest friends said of them,
he had great trouble in contriving facts sufficiently wonderful for the
characters who were to deal with them, and characters high and noble
enough to deal with the great and exalted facts. On one hand or the
other his scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy which
painted itself so alluringly before him faded on his advance and left
him planted heavy-footed in the desert sands. In other words, he was
always getting out of a subject. In the intervals between his last
fiction and his next, when his friends supposed he was purposely
letting his mind lie fallow (and perhaps willingly acquiesced in the
rest they were sharing with him), he was really in an anguish of
inquiry for something on which to employ his powers; he was in a state
of excruciating activity of which the incessant agitation of the atoms
in the physical world is but a faint image; his repose was the mask of
violent vibrations, of volcanic emotions, which required months to
clear themselves in the realization of some ideal altogether
disproportioned to the expenditure of energy which had been tacitly
taking place. At these periods it seemed to him that his lot had been
cast in a world where he was himself about the only interesting fact,
and from which every attractive subject had been removed before he came
into it.

He could never tell just how or when all this changed, and a little
ray, very faint and thin at first, stole in upon his darkness and
broadened to an effulgence which showed his narrow circle a boundless
universe thronged with the most available passions, interests, motives,
situations, catastrophes and denouements, and characters eagerly
fitting themselves with the most appropriate circumstances. As nearly
as he could make out, his liberation to this delightful cosmos took
place through his gradual perception that human nature was of a vast
equality in the important things, and had its difference only in
trifles. He had but to take other men in the same liberal spirit that
he took himself to find them all heroes; he had but to take women at
their own estimate to find them all heroines, if not divinely
beautiful, then interesting, fascinating, irresistibly better than
beautiful. The situation was something like this; it will not do to
give away his whole secret; but the reader needs only a hint in order
to understand how in his new mind Eugenio was overwhelmed with
subjects.

After this illumination of his the only anxiety he had was
concerning his ability to produce all the masterpieces he felt himself
capable of in the short time allotted to the longest-lived writer. He
was aware of a duty to the material he had discovered, and this indeed
sometimes weighed upon him. However, he took courage from the hope that
others would seize his point of view and be able to carry on the work
of producing masterpieces indefinitely. They could never use up all the
subjects, any more than men can exhaust the elements of the aluminium
which abound in every piece of the common earth; but, in their constant
reliance upon every-day life as the true and only source of surprise
and delight in art, they could never be in the terrible despair which
had afflicted him from time to time before his illumination.

Doubtless there is an overruling Providence in this matter which we
may not distrust without accusing the order which has not yet failed in
the due succession of the seasons and the days and nights. While we are
saying it is never going to rain, it rains; or when it seems as if
nature were finally frozen up, a thaw begins; when we feel that the
dark will not end, the dawn is already streaking the east. If the
preacher thinks that the old texts are no longer applicable to life,
there is suddenly reported an outbreak of vice in the city which puts
him in mind of Sodom and Gomorrah; or the opportune flight of a
defaulter furnishes material for a homily which searches the
consciences of half the congregation with the words of the commandment
against stealing. The journalist wakes in heavy-eyed despair, but he
finds from the papers on his breakfast-table that there has been a
revolution in South America, or that the Socialists have been doing
something in Belgium almost too bad even for Socialists as the
capitalists imagine them, and his heart rises again. Even the poor
magazine essayist, who has lived through the long month in dread of the
hour when his copy shall be due, is not forbidden his reprieve. He may
not have anything to say, but he certainly has something to say it
about. The world is always as interesting to-day as it was yesterday,
and probably to-morrow will not be so dull as it promises.

One reason for the disability of the essayist, as distinguished from
the preacher or the journalist, is that he does not give himself range
enough. Expecting to keep scrupulously to one subject, he cannot put
his hand on a theme which he is sure will hold out under him to the
end. Once it was not so. The essayists of antiquity were the most
vagariously garrulous people imaginable. There was not one of them who,
to our small acquaintance with them, kept to his proposition or ended
anywhere in sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius,
Plutarch, they talk of anything but the matter in hand, after
mentioning it; and when you come down to the moderns, for instance, to
such a modern as Montaigne, you find him wandering all over the place.
He has no sooner stated his subject than he begins to talk about
something else; it reminds him (like Lincoln) of a story which has
nothing to do with it; and that story reminds him of another, and so
on, till the original thesis is left flapping in the breeze somewhere
at the vanishing-point in the tortuous perspective and vainly
signalling the essayist back. It was the same, or nearly the same, with
the English essayists quite down to the beginning of the last century,
when they began to cease being. The writers in the Spectator,
the Guardian, the Tatler, the Rambler, and the
rest, contrived to keep a loose allegiance to the stated topic, because
they treated it so very briefly, and were explicitly off to something
else in the next page or two with a fresh text. But if we come to such
delightful masters of the art as Lamb and Leigh Hunt and De Quincey and
Hazlitt, it will not be easy, opening at any chance point, to make out
what they are talking about. They are apparently talking about
everything else in the world but the business they started with. But
they are always talking delightfully, and that is the great matter with
any sort of talker.

When the reviewers began to supplant the essayists, they were even
more contemptuously indifferent to the obligations of constancy. Their
text was nominally some book, but almost as soon as they had named it
they shut it and went off on the subject of it, perhaps, or perhaps
not. It was for the most part lucky for the author that they did so,
for their main affair with the author was to cuff him soundly for his
ignorance and impudence, and then leave him and not return to him
except for a few supplementary cuffs at the close, just to show that
they had not forgotten him. Macaulay was a notorious offender in this
sort; though why do we say offender? Was not he always delightful? He
was and he is, though we no longer think him a fine critic; and he
meant to be just, or as just as any one could be with a man whom one
differed from in the early Victorian period.

But Macaulay certainly did not keep harking back to his text, if
ever he returned to it at all. His instinct was that a preacher's
concern was with his text, but not an essayist's or a reviewer's, and
he was right enough. The essayist certainly has no such obligation or
necessity. His reader can leave him at any moment, unless he is very
interesting, and it does not matter where they part company. In fact,
it might be argued that the modern fidelity to its subject is one of
the chief evidences or causes of the essay's decay. The essayist tries
to make a mechanical conscience perform the duty of that fine spiritual
freedom in which the essay once had its highest effect with the reader,
and in his dull loyalty to the stated thesis he is superficial as well
as tiresome.

The true subject is not one subject only, but many. It is like that
pungent bulb whose odorous energy increases with exfoliation, and
remains a potent fragrance in the air after the bulb has substantially
ceased to be under the fingers. The error of the modern essayist is to
suppose that he can ever have a single subject in hand; he has a score,
he has a hundred, as his elders and betters all know; and what he
mistakes for his destitution is really his superfluity. If he will be
honest (as he may with difficulty be), must not he recognize that what
seems a search for one theme is a hesitation between many pressing
forward for his choice? If he will make this admission we believe he
will be nearer the fact, and he will be a much more respectable figure
than he could feel himself in blindly fumbling about for a single
thesis. Life is never, and in nothing, the famine, perhaps, that we
imagine it. Much more probably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are
the pangs of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More people
are suffering from too much than from too little. Especially are the
good things here in a demoralizing profusion. Ask any large employer of
labor, and he will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an
excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any workman what ails
his employer, and he will say that it is the ownership of the earth,
with a mortgage on planetary space. Both are probably right, or at
least one is as right as the other.

When we have with difficulty made our selection from the divine
redundancy of the ideal world, and so far as we could have reduced
ourselves to the penury of a sole possession, why do not we turn our
eyes to the example of Nature in not only bringing forth a hundred or a
thousand fold of the kind of seed planted, but in accompanying its
growth with that of an endless variety of other plants, all coming to
bear in a like profusion? Observe that wise husbandwoman (this is not
the contradiction in terms it seems), how when her business is
apparently a hay harvest, she mingles myriads of daisies and milkweed
and wild carrot and redtop with the grass, and lets her fancy riot all
round the meadow in a broidery of blackberries and asters and dogroses
and goldenrod. She never works without playing; and she plays even
while man is workingplays so graciously and winningly that it takes
the heart with joy. Who has ever looked upon an old-world wheat-field,
where poppies and vetches are frolicking among the ears, and begrudged
Nature her pastime? No one, we will venture, but the owner of the
field, who is perhaps also too much of a philosopher to grieve over it.
In the ideal world it is much the same. There, too, art having chosen a
kind brings it to bear with all the other kinds which have been lurking
in the unconscious soil of the mind and only waiting tilth for any
purpose before springing up in company with the selected seed. This is
what makes the poets and novelists and dramatists so much more
profitable reading than the moralists. From whom, indeed, has the vital
wisdom of the race been garnered? Not from those hard, ethical masters
who have sought to narrow culture to the business of growing precepts,
but from the genial teachers who have inculcated amusement and breathed
into the unwary mind some inspiration which escaped as unconsciously
from themselves. Which philosopher or sage of them all has instructed
mankind a hundredth part as much as Shakespeare, who supposed himself
to be merely providing diversion for the patrons of the Globe Theatre?

It follows, if not directly, then a long way about, from what we
have been saying, that the real artist is never at a loss for a
subject. His trouble is too many themes, not too few; and, having
chosen among them, his error will be in an iron sequence rather than in
a desultory progression. He is to arrive, if at all, laden with the
spoil of the wayside, and bringing with him the odor of the wild
flowers carpeting or roofing the by-paths; if he is a little bothered
by the flowering brambles which have affectionately caught at him in
his course, that does not greatly matter; or, at least, it is better
than coming back to his starting-point in boots covered with the mud of
the high-road or coat powdered with its dust. The sauntering ease, the
excursive delays, will be natural to the poet or the novelist, who is
born to them; but the essayist must in a manner make them his own, if
he would be an artist and survive among the masters, which there has
been some doubt of his doing. It should be his care to shun every
appearance of continuity; only in the practice of the fitful, the
capricious, the desultory, can he hope to emulate the effects of the
creative. With any other ideal he cannot hope to be fit company for the
high minds who have furnished mankind with quotations. But for the
prevalence of the qualities which we have been urging the essayist to
cultivate, in the essays of Bacon, it is not probable that any one
would ever have fancied that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.

At the moment of this writing, everybody is hurrying into the
country, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the city; at the
moment when it becomes that reading we hope for, everybody will be
hurrying into the city, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the
country. At either moment the experiences of Florindo and Lindora
should have a certain interest.

Florindo and Lindora are a married pair, still comparatively happy
after forty years of wedded life, who have spent the part or the whole
of each hot season out of town, sometimes in the hills, sometimes by
the sea, sometimes in Europe. Their acquaintance with either form of
sojourn, if not exhaustive, is so comprehensive that it might be cited
as encyclopaedic.

The first season or so they did not think of shutting up their house
in the city, or doing more than taking, the latter part of August, a
trip to Niagara or Saratoga or Cape May or Lake George, or some of
those simple, old-fashioned resorts whose mere mention brings a sense
of pre-existence, with a thrill of fond regret, to the age which can no
longer be described as middle and is perhaps flattered by the epithet
of three-quartering. No doubt people go to those places yet, but
Florindo and Lindora have not been to any of them for so many summers
that they can hardly realize them as still open: for them they were
closed in the earliest of the eighteen-seventies.

After that, say the third summer of their marriage, it appeared to
Lindora essential to take board somewhere for the whole summer, at such
an easy distance that Florindo could run up or down or out every
Saturday afternoon and stay Sunday with her and the children; for there
had now begun to be children, who could not teethe in town, and for
whom the abundance of pure milk, small fruits, and fresh vegetables
promised with the shade and safety of the farm was really requisite.
She kept the house in town still open, as before, or rather half-open,
for she left only the cook in it to care for her husband, and do the
family wash, sent to and fro by express, while she took the second girl
with her as maid. In the first days of September, when the most
enterprising of the fresh vegetables were beginning to appear on the
table, and the mosquitoes were going, and the smell of old potatoes in
the cellar and rats in the walls was airing out, and she was getting
used to the peculiar undulations of her bed, she took the little
teethers back to town with her; and when she found her husband in the
comfortable dimensions of their own house, with melons and berries and
tender steak, and rich cream (such as never comes on pure milk"), and
hot and cold baths, and no flies, she could not help feeling that he
had been very selfish. Now she understood, at least, why he never
failed on Monday morning to wake in time for the stage to carry him to
the station, and she said, No more farm-board for her if she knew it.

In those idyllic days, while they were making their way, and
counting the cost of every step as if it were the proverbial first
step, the next step for Lindora was a large boarding-house for the
summer. She tried it first in the country, and she tried it next at the
seaside, with the same number of feet of piazza in both cases, and with
no distinct difference except in the price. It was always dearer at the
seaside, but if it had been better she should not have thought it so
dear. Yet, as it was dearer, she could not help thinking it was better;
and there was the beach for the teethers to dig in, and there was an
effect of superior fashion in the gossipers on the piazza, one to every
three of the three hundred feet of the piazza, rocking and talking, and
guessing at the yachts in the offing, and then bathing and coming out
to lie on the sand and dry their hair.

At the farm she had paid seven dollars a week for herself, and
half-price for the children; at the country boarding-house she had paid
ten for herself, and again half-price for the children; at the seaside
boarding-house the rate for her was fourteen dollars, and nine for the
children and the maid. Everybody on the piazza said it was very cheap,
but to Lindora it was so dear that she decided for Florindo that they
could not go on keeping the house open and the cook in it just for him,
as the expressage on the wash took away all the saving in that. If she
allowed him to sleep in the house, he could pick up his meals for much
less than they now cost. They must not burn their candle at both ends;
he must put out his end. There was reason in this, because now Florindo
was sometimes kept so late at business that he could not get the last
train Saturday night for the beach, and he missed the Sunday with his
family on which she counted so much. Thinking these things over during
the ensuing winter, she began to divine, toward spring, that the only
thing for the teethers, and the true way for Florindo, was for her to
get away from the city to a good distance, where there would be a real
change of air, and that a moderate hotel in the White Mountains or the
Adirondacks was the only hopeful guess at their problem. If Florindo
could not come for Sunday when they were off only an hour or two, it
would be no worse for them to be seven or eight hours off. Florindo
agreed the more easily because he had now joined a club, where he got
his meals as comfortably as at home and quite as economically, counting
in the cook. He could get a room also at the club, and if they shut the
house altogether, and had it wired by the burglar-insurance company,
they would be cutting off a frightful drain.

It was, therefore, in the interest of clearly ascertained economy
that Lindora took her brood with her to a White Mountain hotel, where
she made a merit of getting board for seventeen dollars and a half a
week, when so many were paying twenty and twenty-five. Florindo came up
twice during the summer, and stayed a fortnight each time, and fished,
and said that it had been a complete rest. On the way back to town
Lindora stopped for October in one of those nice spring-and-fall places
where you put in the half-season which is so unwholesome in the city
after a long summer in the country, and afterward she always did this.
Fortunately, Florindo was prospering, and he could afford the increased
cost of this method of saving. The system was practised with great
success for four or five years, and then, suddenly, it failed.

Lindora was tired of always going to the same place, sick and tired;
and, as far as she could see, all those mountain-places were the same
places. She could get no good of the air if she bored herself; the nice
people did not go to hotels so much now, anyway, and the children were
dreadful, no fit associates for the teethers, who had long ceased to
teethe but needed a summer outing as much as ever. A series of seasons
followed when the married pair did not know where to go, in the person
of the partner who represented them, and they had each spring a
controversy vividly resembling a quarrel, but which was really not a
quarrel, because the Dear knew that if it were not for the children
Lindora would only be too glad never to leave their own house winter or
summer, but just to stick there, year out and year in. Then, at least,
she could look a little after Florindo, who had lived so much at the
club that he had fairly forgotten he had a wife and children.
The trouble was all with Florindo, anyway; he cared more for his
business than his family, much; if he did not, he could have managed
somehow to spend the summers with them. Other men did it, and ran down
once a month, or once a fortnight, to put things in shape, and then
came back.

Sleeping on a midnight view of her hard case, Lindora woke one
morning with an inspiration; it might not be too much to call it a
revelation. She wondered at herself, she was ashamed of herself, for
not having thought of it before. Europe, of course, was the only
solution. Once in Europe, you need not worry about where to go, for you
could go anywhere. Europe was everywhere, and you had your choice of
the Swiss mountains, where every breath made another person of you, or
the Italian lakes with their glorious scenery, or the English lakes
with their literary associations, or Scheveningen and all Holland, or
Etretat, or Ostend, or any of those thousands of German baths where you
could get over whatever you had, and the children could pick up
languages with tutors, and the life was so amusing. Going to Europe was
excuse enough in itself for Florindo to leave his business, and, if he
could not be gone more than one summer, he could place her and the
children out there till their health and education were completed, and
they could all return home when it was time for the girls to think of
coming out and the boys of going to college.

Florindo, as she expected, had not a reasonable word to say against
a scheme that must commend itself to any reasonable man. In fact, he
scarcely opposed it. He said he had begun to feel a little run down,
and he had just been going to propose Europe himself as the true
solution. She gladly gave him credit for the idea, and said he had the
most inventive mind she ever heard of. She agreed without a murmur to
the particular German baths which the doctor said would be best for
him, because she just knew that the waters would be good for all of
them; and when he had taken his cure the family made his after-cure
with him, and they had the greatest fun, after the after-cure, in
travelling about Germany. They got as far down as the Italian lakes in
the early autumn, and by the time Florindo had to go back the rest were
comfortably settled in Paris for the winter.

As a solution Europe was perfect, but it was not perpetual. After
three years the bottom seemed to fall out, as Florindo phrased it, and
the family came home to face the old fearful problem of where to spend
the summer. Lindora knew where not to spend it, but her wisdom ended
there, and when a friend who was going to Europe offered them her
furnished cottage at a merely nominal rent, Lindora took it because she
could not think of anything else. They all found it so charming that
after that summer she never would think again of hotels or any manner
of boarding. They hired cottages, at rents not so nominal as at first,
but not so very extravagant if you had not to keep the city rent going,
too; and it finally seemed best to buy a cottage, and stop the leak of
the rent, however small it was. Lindora did not count the interest on
the purchase-money, or the taxes, or the repairs, or the winter
care-taking.

She was now living, and is still living, as most of her
contemporaries and social equals are living, not quite free of care,
but free of tiresome associations, cramped rooms, bad beds, and bad
food, with an environment which you can perfectly control if you are
willing to pay the price. The situation is ideal to those without, and,
if not ideal to those within, it is nevertheless the best way of
spending the hot season known to competitive civilization. What is most
interesting to the student of that civilization is the surprisingly
short time in which it has been evolved. Half a century ago it was
known only to some of the richest people. A few very old and opulent
families in New York had country-places on the Hudson; in Boston the
same class had summer houses at Nahant or in Pepperell. The wealthy
planters of the South came North to the hotels of Saratoga, Lake
George, and Niagara, whither the vast majority of the fashionable
Northern people also resorted. In the West it was the custom to leave
home for a summer trip up the lakes or down the St. Lawrence. But this
was the custom only for the very sophisticated, and even now in the
West people do not summer outside of their winter homes to at all the
same extent as in the East.

The experience of Florindo and Lindora is easily parallelable in
that of innumerable other married pairs of American race, who were the
primitive joke of the paragrapher and the caricaturist when the day of
farm-boarding began. Though the sun of that day has long set for
Florindo and Lindora, it seems to be still at the zenith for most young
couples beginning life on their forgotten terms, and the joke holds in
its pristine freshness with the lowlier satirists, who hunt the city
boarder in the country and the seaside boarding-houses. The Florindos
and the Lindoras of a little greater age and better fortune abound in
the summer hotels at the beaches and in the mountains, though at the
more worldly watering-places the cottagers have killed off the hotels,
as the graphic parlance has it. The hotels nowhere, perhaps, flourish
in their old vigor; except for a brief six weeks, when they are fairly
full, they languish along the rivers, among the hills, and even by the
shores of the mournful and misty Atlantic.

The summer cottage, in fine, is what Florindo and Lindora have
typically come to in so many cases that it may be regarded as the
typical experience of the easily circumstanced American of the East, if
not of the West. The slightest relaxation of the pressure of narrow
domestic things seems to indicate it, and the reader would probably be
astonished to find what great numbers of people, who are comparatively
poor, have summer cottages, though the cottage in most cases is perhaps
as much below the dignity of a real cottage as the sumptuous villas of
Newport are above it. Summer cottages with the great average of those
who have them began in the slightest and simplest of shanties,
progressing toward those simulacra of houses aptly called shells, and
gradually arriving at picturesque structures, prettily decorated, with
all the modern conveniences, in which one may spend two-thirds of the
year and more of one's income than one has a quiet conscience in.

It would not be so bad, if one could live in them simply, as Lindora
proposed doing when she made Florindo buy hers for her, but the graces
of life cannot be had for nothing, or anything like nothing, and when
you have a charming cottage, and are living on city terms in it, you
have the wish to have people see you doing it. This ambition leads to
endless and rather aimless hospitality, so that some Lindoras have been
known, after keeping a private hotel in their cottages for a series of
summers, to shut them or let them, and go abroad for a much-needed
rest, leaving their Florindos to their clubs as in the days of their
youth, or even allowing them to live in their own houses with their
cooks.

Nothing in this world, it seems, is quite what we want it to be; we
ourselves are not all that we could wish; and, whatever shape our
summering takes, the crumpled rose-leaf is there to disturb our repose.
The only people who have no crumpled rose-leaves under them are those
who have no repose, but stay striving on amid the heat of the city
while the prey of the crumpled rose-leaf is suffering among the hills
or by the sea. Those home-keeping Sybarites, composing seven-eighths of
our urban populations, immune from the anguish of the rose-leaf, form
themselves the pang of its victims in certain extreme cases; the
thought of them poisons the pure air, and hums about the sleepless
rest-seeker in the resorts where there are no mosquitoes. There are
Florindos, there are Lindoras, so sensitively conscienced that, in the
most picturesque, the most prettily appointed and thoroughly
convenienced cottages, they cannot forget their fellow-mortals in the
summer hotels, in the boarding-houses by sea or shore, in the farms
where they have small fruits, fresh vegetables, and abundance of milk
and eggs; yes, they even remember those distant relations who toil and
swelter in the offices, the shops, the streets, the sewers; and they
are not without an unavailing shame for their own good-fortune.

But is it really their good-fortune? They would not exchange it for
the better fortune of the home-keepers, and yet it seems worse than
that of people less voluntarily circumstanced. There is nothing left
for Florindo and Lindora to try, except spending the summer on a yacht,
which they see many other Florindos and Lindoras doing. Even these gay
voyagers, or gay anchorers (for they seem most of the time to be moored
in safe harbors), do not appear altogether to like their lot, or to be
so constantly contented with it but that they are always coming off in
boats to dine at the neighboring hotels. Doubtless a yacht has a
crumpled rose-leaf under it, and possibly the keelless hull of the
houseboat feels the irk of a folded petal somewhere.

Florindo and Lindora are not spoiled, she is sure of that in her own
case, for she has never been unreasonably exacting of circumstance. She
has always tried to be more comfortable than she found herself, but
that is the condition of progress, and it is from the perpetual
endeavor for the amelioration of circumstance that civilization
springs. The fault may be with Florindo, in some way that she cannot
see, but it is certainly not with her, and, if it is not with him, then
it is with the summer, which is a season so unreasonable that it will
not allow itself to be satisfactorily disposed of. In town it is
intolerable; in the mountains it is sultry by day and all but freezing
by night; at the seaside it is cold and wet or dry and cold; there are
flies and mosquitoes everywhere but in Europe, and, with the bottom
once out of Europe, you cannot go there without dropping through. In
Lindora's experience the summer has had the deceitful effect of owning
its riddle read at each new conjecture, but, having exhausted all her
practical guesses, she finds the summer still the mute, inexorable
sphinx for which neither farm-board, boarding-houses, hotels, European
sojourn, nor cottaging is the true answer.

Sometimes Florindo or Lindora is out of all patience with the
summer, and in a despair which she is careful to share with Florindo,
as far as she can make him a partner of it. But as it is his business
to provide the means of each new condition, and hers to prove it
impossible, he is not apt to give way so fully as she. He tells her
that their trouble is that they have always endeavored to escape an
ordeal which if frankly borne might not have been so bad, and he has
tried to make her believe that some of the best times he has had in
summer have been when he was too busy to think about it. She retorts
that she is busy, too, from morning till night, without finding the
least relief from the summer ordeal or forgetting it a single moment.

The other day he came home from the club with a beaming face, and
told her that he had just heard of a place where the summer was
properly disposed of, and she said that they would go there at once,
she did not care where it was.

Well, I don't know, he answered. There would have to be two
opinions, I believe.

Why? she demanded, sharply. Where is it?

In the other world. Fanshawe, the Swedenborgian, was telling me
about it. In one of the celestial heavensthere seem to be seven of
themit appears that all the four seasons are absorbed into one, as
all the different ages are absorbed into a sort of second youth. This
sole season is neither hot nor cold, but has the quality of a perpetual
springtime. How would you like that?

Lindora was too vexed with him to make any answer, and he was sorry.
He, too, felt the trouble of the summer more than he would allow, and
he would willingly have got away from it if he could. Lindora's
impatience with it amused him, but it is doubtful if in the moment of
his greatest amusement with her impatience he had any glimpse of that
law of the universal life by which no human creature is permitted to
escape a due share of the responsibilities and burdens of the common
lot, or realized that to seek escape from them is a species of
immorality which is unfailingly punished like any other sin, in and
from itself.

As the winter deepens and darkens, the people who have time and
money to waste, and who are always seeking opportunities for
squandering both, find none so gracious and graceful as giving dinners
to other people who have time and money to waste. The prime condition
of such dinners is that neither host nor guest shall need them. The
presence of a person who actually wanted meat and drink would imply
certain insuperable disqualifications. The guest must have the habit of
dining, with the accumulated indifference to dinners and the inveterate
inability to deal peptically with them which result from the habit of
them. Your true diner must be well on in middle life, for though the
young may eat and drink together and apparently dine, it is of the gray
head difficultly bowed over the successive courses, and the full form
of third youth straining its silken calyx and bursting all too richly
out above it, that the vision presents itself when one thinks of
dinners and diners.

After all the exclusions are made, dinner is still a theme so large
that one poor Easy Chair paper could not compass it, or do more than
attach itself here and there to its expanse. In fact, it was only one
kind of dinner we had in mind at the beginning, and that was the larger
or smaller public dinner. There the process of exclusion is carried yet
a step further, and the guests are all men, and for the most part
elderly men. The exceptional public dinners where women are asked need
not be counted; and at other public dinners they do not seem eager to
throng the galleries, where they are handsomely privileged to sit,
looking down, among the sculptured and frescoed arabesques, on the sea
of bald heads and shirt-fronts that surge about the tables below, and
showing like dim, decollete angels to the bleared vision raised to them
from the floor. As they are not expected to appear till the smoking and
speaking have begun, they grow fainter and fainter through the clouds
of tobacco and oratory, and it is never known to the diners whether
they abuse the chary hospitality of coffee and ices offered them in
their skyey height, where from time to time the sympathetic ear may
hear them softly gasping, gently coughing.

It is a pity that none of these witnesses of a large public dinner
has recorded her bird's-eye impression of it at the interesting moment
when their presence is suffered or desired. All those gray or bald
heads, and all those bulging shirt-fronts, must look alike at the first
glance, and it can be only to carefuler scrutiny that certain
distinctions of projecting whiskers and mustaches pronounce themselves.
The various figures, lax or stiff in their repletion, must more or less
repeat one another, and the pudgy hands, resting heavily on the tables'
edges or planted on their owners' thighs, must seem of a very
characterless monotony. The poor old fellows ranked in serried sameness
at the tables slanted or curved from the dais where the chairman and
the speakers sit must have one effect of wishing themselves at home in
bed.

What do they really think of it, those angels, leaning over and
looking down on it? Does it strike them with envy, with admiration?
Does it seem one of the last effects of a high and noble civilization?
To their finer female sense, what is the appeal of that evanescing
spectacle, as the noise of the cheering and the laughing and the
clapping of hands rises to them at some more rocket-like explosion of
oratory? Is the oratory mainly of the same quality to those supernal
intelligences as the fading spectacle? None of them has said, and we
may have still the hope that the whole affair may have seemed to them
the splendid and graceful ceremonial which it appears in the
illustrations of the next day's papers.

The speaking is perhaps not always so good as it seems to the
mellowed tolerance of the listener, when it begins after all those
courses of meat and drink, but not perhaps always so bad as he thinks
it when, the morning following, he wakes high sorrowful and cloyed,
and has not yet read the reports of it. In confidence, however, it may
be owned that it is apt rather to be bad than good. If what has led up
to it has softened the critical edge of the listener, it has not
sharpened the critical edge of the speaker, and they meet on the common
ground where any platitude passes, where a farrago of funny stories
serves the purpose of coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit
lights up the obscurity as with an electric radiance, where any
slightest trickle or rinsing of sentiment refreshes the burning
forehead and the parching tongue like a gush of genuine poetry. The
mere reputation of the speaker goes a great way, almost the whole way;
and, especially if he is a comic speaker, he might rise up and sit down
without a word and yet leave his hearers the sense of having been
richly amused. If he does more, if he really says something droll, no
matter how much below the average of the give and take of common talk,
the listener's gratitude is frantic. It is so eager, it so outruns
utterance, that it is not strange the after-dinner speech should be the
favorite field of the fake-humorist, who reaps a full and ever-ripened
harvest in it, and prospers on to a celebrity for brilliancy which
there is little danger of his ever forfeiting so long as he keeps
there.

The fake-humorous speaker has an easier career than even the
fake-eloquent speaker. Yet at any given dinner the orator who passes
out mere elocution to his hearers has a success almost as instant and
splendid as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things people will
applaud when they have the courage of one another's ineptitude. They
will listen, after dinner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the
old speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of humor, of
eloquence; if they have tasted the brew before, they know what they are
going to get. The note of their mood is tolerance, but tolerance of the
accustomed, the expected; not tolerance of the novel, the surprising.
They wish to be at rest, and what taxes their minds molests their
intellectual repose. They do not wish to climb any great heights to
reach the level of the orator. Perhaps, after all, they are difficult
in their torpidity.

The oratory seems to vary less throughout any given dinner than from
dinner to dinner, and it seems better or worse according as the dinner
is occasional or personal. The occasional dinner is in observance of
some notable event, as the Landing of the Pilgrims, or the Surrender of
Cornwallis, or the Invention of Gunpowder, or the Discovery of America.
Its nature invites the orator to a great range of talk; he may browse
at large in all the fields of verbiage without seeming to break bounds.
It rests with him, of course, to decide whether he will talk too long,
for the danger that he may do so cannot be guarded from the outside.
The only good after-dinner speaker is the man who likes to speak, and
the man who likes to speak is always apt to speak too much. The hapless
wretch whom the chairman drags to his feet in a cold perspiration of
despair, and who blunders through half a dozen mismated sentences,
leaving out whatever he meant to say, is not to be feared; he is to be
pitied from the bottom of one's soul. But the man whose words come
actively to the support of his thoughts, and whose last word suggests
to him another thought, he is the speaker to be feared, and yet not
feared the worst of all. There is another speaker more dreadful still,
who thinks as little standing as sitting, and whose words come
reluctantly, but who keeps on and on in the vain hope of being able to
say something before he stops, and so cannot stop.

The speaking at the occasional dinner, however, is much more in the
control of the chairman than the speaking at the personal dinner. The
old fashion of toasts is pretty well past, but the chairman still
appoints, more or less, the subject of the speaker he calls up. He may
say, if the dinner is in honor of the Invention of Gunpowder, We have
with us to-night a distinguished soldier who has burned a good deal of
gunpowder in his time; and I am sure we should all like to hear from
General Jones something of his experience with the new smokeless
explosives. Or if it is the Discovery of America they are
commemorating, he may call to his feet some representatively venerable
citizen, with a well-earned compliment to his antiquity, and the
humorous suggestion that he was personally knowing to the landing of
Columbus. Then General Jones, or the venerable citizen, will treat at
his pleasure of any subject under heaven, after having made his manners
to that given him by the chairman and professed his unfitness to handle
it.

At the personal dinner, the speaker must in decency stick for a
while at least to his text, which is always the high achievement of the
honored guest, in law, letters, medicine, arms, drainage, dry-goods,
poultry-farming, or whatever. He must not, at once, turn his back on
the honored guest and talk of other things; and when sometimes he does
so it seems rude.

The menu laid before the diner at this sort of dinner may report a
variety of food for the others, but for the honored guest the sole
course is taffy, with plenty of drawn butter in a lordly dish. The
honored guest is put up beside the chairman, with his mouth propped
open for the taffy, and before the end he is streaming drawn butter
from every limb. The chairman has poured it over him with a generous
ladle in his opening speech, and each speaker bathes him with it anew
from the lordly dish. The several speakers try to surpass one another
in the application, searching out some corner or crevice of his
personality which has escaped the previous orators, and filling it up
to overflowing. The listeners exult with them in their discoveries, and
roar at each triumph of the sort: it is apparently a proof of brilliant
intuition when a speaker seizes upon some forgotten point in the
honored guest's character or career and drenches it with drawn butter.

To what good end do men so flatter and befool one of their harmless
fellows? What is there in the nature of literary or agricultural
achievement which justifies the outrage of his modest sense of
inadequacy? It is a preposterous performance, but it does not reach the
climax of its absurdity till the honored guest rises, with his mouth
filled with taffy, and, dripping drawn butter all over the place,
proceeds to ladle out from the lordly dish, restored to its place
before the chairman, a portion for each of the preceding speakers. He
may not feel quite like doing it. In their fierce rivalry of adulation,
some of them, in order to give fresh flavor to the taffy, may have
mingled a little vinegar with it. One may have said that the bantams of
the honored guest were not perhaps as small as some other bantams, but
that the colossal size of his shanghais was beyond parallel. Another
may have hinted, for the purpose of superiorly praising his masterly
treatment of the pip, that the diet of his hens was not such as to
impart to their eggs the last exquisite flavor demanded by the pampered
palate of the epicure. Another yet may have admitted that the honored
guest had not successfully grappled with the great question of how to
make hens lay every working-day of the year, and he may have done this
in order to heighten his grand climax that the man who teaches a hen to
lay an egg with two yolks where she laid eggs of but one yolk before is
a greater benefactor to the human race than all the inventors of all
the missiles of modern warfare. Such a poultry-farmer, he may have
declared, preparatory to taking his seat amid thunders of applause, is
to other poultry-farmers what the poet who makes the songs of a people
is to the boss who makes their laws. This sentiment may have been met
with a furore of acceptance, all the other guests leaning forward to
look at the honored guest and concentrate their applause upon him, as
they clapped and cheered, and one fine fellow springing to his feet and
shouting, Here's to the man who made two-yolk eggs grow where one-yolk
eggs grew before.

Yet these artfully studied qualifications of the cloying sweet may
have been all of the taste of wormwood to the honored guest, who cared
nothing for his easy triumph with shanghais and the pip and these
two-yolk eggs, but prided himself on his bantams and his hen-food, and
was clinging to the hope that his discoveries in the higher education
would teach hens to observe the legal holidays if they could not be
taught to lay on every working-day, and was trusting to keep his
measure of failure a secret from the world. It would not do, however,
to betray anything of his vexation. That would be ungracious and
ungrateful, and so he must render back taffy for taffy, drawn butter
for drawn butter, till the whole place sticks and reeks with it.

Of course, the readerespecially if he has never been asked to a
personal dinner of this sortwill be saying that the fault is not with
the solemnity or its nature, but with the taste of those who conduct
the ceremony. He will no doubt be thinking that if he were ever made
the object of such a solemnity, or the chairman, or the least of the
speakers, he would manage differently. Very likely he will allege the
example of the Greeks, as we have it recorded in the accounts of the
banquet offered to Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and the
supper given to AEschylus on the hundredth performance of the
OEdipus of Sophocles.

The supper has always been considered rather a refinement upon the
banquet, in taste, as it was offered to the venerable poet not upon the
occasion of any achievement of his own, but in recognition of the
prolonged triumph of his brother dramatist, in which it was assumed
that he would feel a generous interest. The banquet to Themistocles was
more in the nature of a public rejoicing, for it celebrated a victory
due as much to the valor of all the Greeks as to the genius of the
admiral; and it could, therefore, be made more directly a compliment to
him. Even under these circumstances, however, the guest of the evening
occupied an inconspicuous place at the reporters' table, while he was
represented on the chairman's right by the bust of Poseidon, hastily
modelled for the occasion by Praxiteles, and dedicated to Themistocles,
who was a plain man, but whose portrait, even if he had been handsome,
it was thought would not have looked well in such a position at a time
when portrait-statuary was unknown. The only direct allusion to him was
in the opening toast, The Dewey of Our Day, which was drunk sitting,
the guests rising from their recumbent postures in honor of it. The
chairman's opening address was almost wholly a plea for the enlargement
of the Athenian navy: the implication that the republic had been saved,
in spite of its inefficient armament, was accepted as the finest
possible compliment to the guest of the evening. The note of all the
other speeches was their exquisite impersonality. They got further and
further from the occasion of the evening, until the effort of
Demosthenes closed the speaking with a scathing denunciation of the
machine politicians who had involved the Athenians in a war with Persia
to further the interests of Sparta. It was held that this was the
noblest tribute which could be paid to the genius of the man who had
brought them safely out of it. As the company broke up, Diogenes with
his lantern approached Themistocles, who was giving the reporters
copies of the speech he had not been asked to deliver, and, after
examining his countenance with a sigh of disappointment, accompanied
him home as far as his own tub; Athens at that time being imperfectly
lighted, and the reform government having not yet replaced the street
names wantonly obliterated under the regime of the Thirty Tyrants.

At the supper to AEschylus the tablets of the menu were inscribed
with verses from the elder poet ingeniously chosen for their imaginable
reference to the masterpiece of the younger, whose modesty was
delicately spared at every point. It was a question whether the
committee managing the affair had not perhaps gone too far in giving
the supper while Sophocles was away from Athens staging the piece at
Corinth; but there was no division of opinion as to the taste with
which some of the details had been studied. It was considered a stroke
of inspiration to have on the speaker's left, where Sophocles would
have sat if he had been present at a supper given to AEschylus, the
sitting figure of Melpomene, crowned with rosemary for remembrance. No
allusion was made to AEschylus during the evening, after his health had
been proposed by the chairman and drunk in silence, but a great and
exquisite surprise was reserved for him in the matter of the speeches
that followed. By prior agreement among the speakers they were all
ostensibly devoted to the examination of the OEdipus and the
other dramas of Sophocles, which in his absence were very frankly dealt
with. But the unsparing criticism of their defects was made implicitly
to take the character of appreciation of the AEschylus tragedies, whose
good points were all turned to the light without open mention of them.
This afforded the aged poet an opportunity of magnanimously defending
his younger confrere, and he rose to the occasion, beaming, as
some one said, from head to foot and oozing self-satisfaction at every
pore. He could not put from him the compliments not ostensibly directed
at him, but he could and did take up the criticisms of the Sophoclean
drama, point by point, and refute them in the interest of literature,
with a masterly elimination of himself and his own part in it. A Roman
gentleman present remarked that he had seen nothing like it, for
sincere deprecation, since Caesar had refused the thrice-offered crown
on the Lupercal; and the effect was that intended throughoutthe
supreme honor of AEschylus in the guise of a tribute to Sophocles. The
note of the whole affair was struck by the comic poet Aristophanes,
whom the chairman called upon to make the closing speech of the
evening, and who merely sat up long enough to quote the old Attic
proverb, Gentlemen, there are many ways to kill a dog besides choking
him to death with butter, and then lay down again amid shrieks of
merriment from the whole company.

There is, perhaps, a middle course between the American and Athenian
ways of recognizing achievement in the arts or interests, or of
commemorating great public events. This would probably derive from each
certain advantages, or at least the ancient might temper the modern
world to a little more restraint than it now practises in the
celebration of private worth, especially. The public events may be more
safely allowed to take care of themselves, though it is to be
questioned whether it is well for any people to make overmuch of
themselves. They cannot do it without making themselves ridiculous, and
perhaps making themselves sick of what little real glory there is in
any given affair; they will have got that so inextricably mixed up with
the vainglory that they will have to reject the one to free themselves
from the humiliating memory of the other.

There is nothing that so certainly turns to shame in the retrospect
as vainglory, and this is what the personal dinner is chiefly supposed
to inspire in the victim of it. If he is at all honest with himself,
and he probably is before he can have done anything worthy of notice,
he knows perfectly well that he has not merited all if any of the fond
flatteries with which he is heaped, as he sits helpless with meat and
drink, and suffers under them with the fatuous smile which we all have
seen and which some of us have worn. But as the flatterers keep coming
on and on, each with his garland of tuberoses or sunflowers, he begins
to think that there must be some fire where there is so much smoke, and
to feel the glow of the flame which he is not able exactly to locate.
He burns in sympathy with his ardent votaries, he becomes inevitably a
partner in his own apotheosis. It is the office of the sad, cold
morrow, and the sadder and colder after-morrows, to undo this illusion,
to compress his head to the measure of his hat, to remove the drawn
butter from his soul.

They may never wholly succeed, but this is not probable, and it is
not against a permanent folie des grandeurs that we need seek to
guard the victim of a personal dinner. We have, indeed, so much faith
in the ultimate discretion of the race that we should be quite willing
to intrust the remarkable man himself with the office of giving himself
a public dinner when he felt that his work merited signal recognition.
In this way the whole affair could be kept within bounds. He could
strike the note, he could set the pace, in his opening address; and,
having appointed the speakers, with a full knowledge of their honesty
and subordination, he could trust the speeches to be sane and
temperate. In calling the speakers successively up, he could protest
against anything that seemed excessive eulogy in the words already
spoken, and could invite a more modest estimate of his qualities and
achievements in the speeches to follow.

In the beginning of the season which is called Silly in the world of
journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and
the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something
to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday
in search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were
that the Easy Chair should not exact material of weight or importance,
but should gratefully accept whatever they brought back to it, and make
the most of it. On these terms they set out on their labor of love.

* * * * *

By the time the sun had quitted the face of the vast apartment-house
on which the day habitually broke, and had gone about its business of
lighting and heating the city roofs and streets, the holiday companions
were well on their way up the Third Avenue Elevated toward that region
of the Bronx which, in all their New York years, they had never yet
visited. They exulted at each stop and start of the train in the long
succession of streets which followed so fast upon one another that the
guards gave up trying to call them out as a hundred-and-so-many, and
simply said Fifty-fifth, and Sixty-sixth, and Seventy-seventh Street.
This slight of their duty to the public comported agreeably with the
slip-shod effectiveness of the whole apparatus of the New York life:
the rows and rows of shops, the rows and rows of flats, the rows and
rows of back yards with miles of wash flying in the soft May wind,
which, probably, the people in the open car ahead felt almost a gale.

When the train got as far as the composite ugliness of the ships and
tugs and drawbridges of Harlem River, the companions accepted the
ensemble as picturesqueness, and did not require beauty of it. Once
they did get beauty in a certain civic building which fronted the track
and let fall a double stairway from its level in a way to recall the
Spanish Steps and to get itself likened to the Trinita de' Monti at
Rome.

It was, of course, like that only in their fond remembrance, but
this was not the only Roman quality in their cup of pleasure that day;
and they did not care to inquire whether it was merely the flavoring
extract of fancy, or was a genuine infusion from the Italian sky
overhead, the classic architectural forms, the loosely straggling
grass, the flowering woods, the rapture of the birds, the stretches of
the river, the tumbling rapids, which so delicately intoxicated them.
There was a certain fountain gave a peculiar authenticity to their
pleasure, as of some assurance blown in the bottle from which their
joy-draught was poured. Nowhere else but in Rome could they have
imagined such a group of bronze men and maidens and web-footed horses
struggling so bravely, so aimlessly (except to show their figures), in
a shallow bowl from which the water spilled so unstintedly over white
marble brims beginning to paint themselves palely green.

At the end of their glad day this fountain came last of the things
that made Bronx Park such a paradise for eight hours; though it might
have been their first delight if they had taken one way about instead
of another in their tour of the large, easy pleasance. But suddenly at
half-past eleven they found themselves ravenously hungry, and demanded
to be driven to the best restaurant by the shortest way that the mild
youth whom they fell to at once inside the park gate could find.

He had the very horse he ought to have hadold, weary, infirm,
decently hiding its disabilities under a blanket, and, when this was
stripped away, confessing them in a start so reluctant that they had to
be explained as the stiffness natural to any young, strong, and fresh
horse from resting too long. It did, in fact, become more animated as
time went on, and perhaps it began to take an interest in the landscape
left so charmingly wild wherever it could be. It apparently liked being
alive there with its fares, kindred spirits, who could appreciate the
privacy of a bland Monday after the popular outing of the day before.
Almost nobody else was in the park. For a time they noted only a young
fellow with a shut book in his hand taking his way up a woody slope and
fading into a green shadow; but presently they came to a grassy point
running down to the road, where, under a tree, there was a young mother
sitting with an open book in her lap, and, a little way from her
outstretched little foot, her baby asleep in the smallest of
go-cartsthe collapsible sort that you can fold and carry in the cars
and then unfold for use when you come to the right place. The baby had
a white sunbonnet, and a thick fringe of her straw-colored hair came
out over her forehead under it, and when the companions smiled together
at the baby, and the horse intelligently faltered, the young mother
fluttered the idle leaves of her book with her hand and smiled back at
them, and took the credit of the little one, not unkindly, yet proudly.
They said it was all as nice as it could be, and they were still so
content in her and her baby that, when they had to drive out of the
park to cross a street to the section where the restaurant and the
menagerie were, they waited deferentially for a long, long funeral to
get by. They felt pity for the bereaved, and then admiration for people
who could afford to have so many carriages; and they made their driver
ask the mounted policeman whose funeral it was. He addressed the
policeman by name, and the companions felt included in the circle of an
acquaintance where a good deal of domesticity seemed to prevail. The
policeman would not join in the conjecture that it was some
distinguished person; he did not give his reasons; and the pair began
to fret at their delay, and mentally to hurry that poor unknown
undergroundso short is our patience with the dead! When at last their
driver went up round the endless queue of hacks, it suddenly came to an
end, and they were again in the park and among the cages and pens and
ranges of the animals, in the midst of which their own restaurant
appeared. An Italian band of mandolins and guitars was already at
noonday softly murmuring and whimpering in the corner of the veranda
where the tables were set; and they got an amiable old waiter, whose
fault it was not if spring-lamb matures so early in the summer of its
brief term as to seem last-fall-lamb. There is no good reason either to
suppose he did not really believe in the pease. But why will pease that
know they have been the whole winter in the can pretend to be just out
of the pod? Doubtless it is for every implication that all vegetation
is of one ichor with humanity; but the waiter was honester than the
pease. He telephoned for two wheeled chairs, and then said he had
countermanded them because they would be half an hour coming; but again
he telephoned, for by this time the pair had learned that they might
drive into the zoological grounds, but not drive round them; and they
saw from the window the sun smoking hot on the asphalt paths their feet
must press.

[Illustration: ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK]

While the chairs lingered on the way, they went to get what comfort
they could from the bears, whose house was near at hand. They might
well have learned patience here from a bear trying to cope with a
mocking cask in a pool. He pushed it under the water with his paw and
held it hard down; when he turned away as if that cask were done
for, there it was bobbing about on the surface, and he had to down it
again and hold it under till life seemed extinct. At last he gave it up
and left it floating in triumph, but one could infer with what
perseverance he would renew the struggle presently.

There might have been too many bears; but this was the fault of all
their fellow-captives except perhaps the elephants. One cannot really
have enough of elephants; and one would have liked a whole herd of
giraffes, and a whole troop of gnus would not have glutted one's
pleasure in their goat-faces, cow-heads, horse-tails, and pig-feet. But
why so many snakes of a kind? Why such a multiplicity of crocodiles?
Why even more than one of that special pattern of Mexican iguana which
looked as if cut out of zinc and painted a dull Paris green? Why, above
all, so many small mammals?

Small mammals was the favorite phrase of the friendly colored
chairman, who by this time had appeared with an old-soldier comrade and
was pushing the companions about from house to house and cage to cage.
Small mammals, he warned them, were of an offensive odor, and he was
right; but he was proud of them and of such scientific knowledge of
them as he had. The old soldier did not pretend to have any such
knowledge. He fell into a natural subordination, and let his colored
superior lead the way mostly, though he asserted the principle that
this is a white man's country by pushing first to the lions' house
instead of going to the flying-cage, as his dark comrade instructed
him.

It was his sole revolt. But what, we hear the reader asking, is
the flying-cage? We have not come to that yet; we are lingering still
at the lions' house, where two of the most amiable lions in the world
smilingly illustrate the effect of civilization in such of their savage
species as are born in the genial captivity of Bronx Park. We are
staying a moment in the cool stone stable of the elephants and the
rhinoceroses and the hippopotamuses; we are fondly clinging to the
wires of the cages where the hermit-thrushes, snatched from their loved
solitude and mixed with an indiscriminate company of bolder birds, tune
their angelic notes only in a tentative staccato; we are standing rapt
before the awful bell-bird ringing his sharp, unchanging, unceasing
peal, as unconscious of us as if he had us in the heart of his tropical
forest; we are waiting for the mighty blue Brazilian macaw to catch our
names and syllable them to the shrieking, shrilling, snarling society
of parrots trapezing and acrobating about him; we are even stopping to
see the white peahen wearing her heart out and her tail out against her
imprisoning wires; we are delaying to let the flying-cage burst upon us
in the unrivalled immensity promised. That is, we are doing all this in
the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the
cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated
upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and
wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other
water-fowl soars and swims. It was well, they felt, to have had this
kept for the last, with its great lesson of a communistic captivity in
which all nations of men might be cooped together in amity and
equality, instead of being, as now, shut up each in his own cell of
need and fear.

Not having come in an automobile, the companions were forced by an
invidious regulation to find their carriage outside the gate of the
Concourse; but neither the horse nor the driver seemed to feel the
slight of the discrimination. They started off to complete the round of
the park with all their morning cheerfulness and more; for they had now
added several dollars to their tariff of charges by the delay of their
fares, and they might well be gayer. Their fares did not refuse to
share their mood, and when they crossed the Bronx and came into the
region of the walks and drives they were even gayer than their horse
and man. These were more used to the smooth level of the river where it
stretched itself out between its meadowy shores and mirrored the blue
heaven, rough with dusky white clouds, in its bosom; they could not
feel, as their fares did, the novelty in the beauty of that hollow,
that wide grassy cup by which they drove, bathed in the flowery and
blossomy sweetness that filled it to its wood-bordered brim.

But what is the use of counting one by one the joys of a day so
richly jewelled with delight? Rather let us heap them at once in the
reader's lap and not try to part the recurrence of the level-branched
dogwoods in bloom; the sunny and the shadowy reaches of the woods still
in the silken filminess of their fresh young leaves; the grass
springing slenderly, tenderly on the unmown slopes of the roadsides, or
giving up its life in spicy sweetness from the scythe; the gardeners
pausing from their leisurely employ, and once in the person of their
foreman touching their hats to the companions; the wistaria-garlanded
cottage of the keeper of the estate now ceded to the city; the Gothic
stable of the former proprietor looking like a Gothic chapel in its
dell; the stone mansion on its height opening to curiosity a vague
collection of minerals, and recalling with its dim, hardwood interior
the ineffectual state of a time already further outdated than any
colonial prime; the old snuff-mill of the founders, hard by; the dam
breaking into foam in the valley below; the rustic bridge crossing from
shore to shore, with steel-engraving figures leaning on its parapet and
other steel-engraving presences by the water's brink.

The supreme charm is that you are so free to all things in that
generous park; that you may touch them and test them by every sense;
that you may stray among the trees, and lie down upon the grass, and
possess yourself indiscriminately of them quite as if they were your
own.

They are indeed yours in the nobler sense of public proprietorship
which will one day, no doubt, supersede all private ownership. You have
your share of the lands and waters, the birds in the cages and the
beasts, from the lions and elephants in their palaces, and the giraffes
freely browsing and grazing in their paddock, down to the smallest of
the small mammals giving their odor in their pens. You have as much
right as another to the sculptures (all hand-carved, as your colored
chairman will repeatedly tell you) on the mansions of the lordlier
brutes, and there is none to dispute your just portion of the
Paris-green zinc iguana, for you have helped pay for them all.

The key-word of this reflection makes you anxious to find whether
your driver will make you pay him too much, but when you tot up the
hours by his tariff, and timidly suggest that it will be so many
dollars and offer him a bill for the same, he surprises you by saying,
No, he owes you fifty cents on that; and paying it back.

Such at least was the endearing experience of the companions at the
end of their day's pleasure. Not that it was really the end, for there
was the airy swoop homeward in the Elevated train, through all that
ugly picturesqueness of bridges and boats and blocks of buildings, with
the added interest of seeing the back-flying streets below now full of
children let loose from school for the afternoon, and possessing the
roadways and sidewalks as if these, too, were common property like the
park. It seemed to the companions that the children increased toward
the shabbier waterside, and decreased wherever the houses looked
better, through that mystical law of population by which poverty is
richer than prosperity is in children. They could see them yelling and
screaming at their games, though they could not hear them, and they
yelled and screamed the louder to the eye because they were visibly for
the greatest part boys. If they were the offspring of alien parents,
they might be a proof of American decay; but, on the other hand, the
preponderance of boys was in repair of that disproportion of the sexes
which in the east of these States is such a crying evil.

Perhaps it was the behavior of the child in the opposite seat which
made the companions think of girls as a crying evil; the mental
operations are so devious and capricious; but this child was really a
girl. She was a pretty child and prettily dressed, with a little face
full of a petulant and wilful charm, which might well have been too
much for her weak, meek young mother. She wanted to be leaning more
than half out of the window and looking both ways at once, and she
fought away the feebly restraining hands with sharp, bird-like shrieks,
so that the companions expected every moment to see her succeed in
dashing herself to death, and suffered many things from their fear.
When it seemed as if nothing could save them, the guard came in and
told the weak, meek mother that the child must not lean out of the
window. Instantly, such is the force of all constituted authority among
us, the child sat down quietly in her mother's lap, and for the rest of
the journey remained an example to angels, so that the companions could
rejoice as much in her goodness as in her loveliness. She became,
indeed, the crown of their happy day, a day so happy that now in the
faint air of August it is hard to believe it even of May.